@acollierastro.bsky.social says it better than I did. "Everyone can have maximum output while accomplishing nothing." www.youtube.com/watch?v=7pqF...

Huh, I didn't know about this setting. Time to adjust that, then.

Our paper on the mysterious Devonian organism Prototaxites has now finally been published! See the paper here (www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...) and our explainer thread below! Prototaxites reconstruction by Matt Humpage

“The only explanation is that something has coded nonsense in a way that poses as a useful message; only after wasting time and effort does the deception become apparent. The signal functions to consume the resources of a recipient for zero payoff and reduced fitness.” Peter Watts – Blindsight

After being bitten by a radioactive Hugh Everett, Many Worlds Man gains the ability to travel to alternate versions of Earth. Unfortunately for him, most of them are mini-Neptunes.

I love looking around the globe on Google Earth and zooming into tiny islands to see what they're called and find out more about them. Today I seen this one with a catchy name of "Inaccessible Island". Sounds like a skill issue. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inacces...

Brilliant essay in The Guardian by Cory Doctorow, about why AI will fail and how while doing so it will make everything worse for everbody except the oligarchs. www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-i...

TIL that Cambridge University has a Plumian professor. Does it also have a Greenian reverend? A Mustardian colonel?

Vök - "Something Bad" not sure why brain decided to randomly remind me of this one, not sure at all www.youtube.com/watch?v=mV9S...

NASA say that the crew member who was ill and returned to earth is doing well and now having a meal with colleagues.

AAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHH

"We get headlines that treat the chatbot as a self-aware actor taking responsibility, which lets the actual humans who made actual decisions completely off the hook."

Recently updated Cylindrical Texture Calibrator, a Python utility with a GUI that was developed to help the @celestiaproject.bsky.social community with ongoing updates (we need more devs, by the way!). I've included some interesting details in the thread. [1/5]

one of my rules to myself when joining here was not to become an unending fountain of cynicism but

BENOIT BLANC: an' you suh, you uh, you had no ANIMUHS with uh the snake mistuh COILY, none of any kind you might say? Q*BERT: !@#$%? BLANC: suh we do not say that anymore

I guess there's some kind of anthropic argument that would predict non-habitability. Subsurface oceans on icy moons/dwarf planets seem to be common in the Solar System, yet we find ourselves on the sole (remaining?) open-air water world. Something similar probably applies to red dwarf planets.

We don't know what it is. We do know it doesn't like deep-sea mining.

And all the AI evangelists and LLM dipshits I was ranting about the other day? You did this. You enabled this. Fuck you, and fuck your stupid rape culture generator.

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH

Nice, some start of year Sevish stuff www.youtube.com/watch?v=FBk9...

Well, of all the years, that was one of them. Here's some Tom Waits to finish with. www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hp0u...

Funny thing though: Musk and the other tech lords are still saying such things, and the media credulity has not lessened one whit. And they are richer than ever.

Manipuloyx, a new alvarezsaur with really fascinating hands! The condition of the fingers isn't that unusual for the clade but the OSTEODERMS on the hand are new!

And Tiny Tim, who did NOT die was—indeed, is—one of the Universe’s very small number of immortal beings. Most of those who are born immortal instinctively know how to cope with it, but Tiny Tim was not one of them. Indeed, he had come to hate them, the load of serene bastards.

Spent #FossilFriday tweaking my Anchiornis colour reconstruction. The black+white+red intepretation does entirely match the melanosome data recorded for this species, as there's evidence of phaeomelanin (= rufous hues) on the arm, and lots of grey across the body. #paleoart #sciart #paleontology

Brilliant!

Presumably this is one of those "special fares apply" sections of the Tube map.

Happy Solstice!

Funny animal videos no longer being trustworthy just fucking sucks all around. I love the wonder of animal behavior and what it says about the experience of being alive. It's because it happened in reality that it's so fun. It's not fun if it was just made up. There's no wonder there.

you can't spell "sexagesimal" without "ages"! and i have NO IDEA what that implies www.qwantz.com/index.php?co...

Thanks, google. Calling Chlorine Pentafluoride an 'irritant' sounds like calling a chainsaw an exfoliator. Water? Fire. Sand? Fire. Asbestos? Fire. Gold? Fire. CHLORINE PENTAFLUORIDE WILL OXIDISE FIRE ITSELF AND SET NORMAL FIRE ON FIRE. 'irritant'

In a historical milestone, Hubble has witnessed the catastrophic collision of asteroids in the nearby Fomalhaut planetary system 🪨💥  Observations also revealed that an object previously suspected to be a candidate planet was, in fact, a dust cloud.  🔭 🧪

Maybe some of this could have been avoided if Git didn't treat name changes as a world-breaking event, versus them being pretty normal in society. Providing a better way to address this (insert something about Article 16 of the GDPR here) might be what lets some future VCS take over Git's mantle.

"save systems should dynamically handle object IDs and automatically populate the serialized data of every object that requires save states, and then for dialogue progression it needs to-" team cherry: WRONG. 1400 hardcoded fields in PlayerData.cs

Great idea! And if you want something to express that it feels a bit nippy outside, how about some Cult of Luna? www.youtube.com/watch?v=0alD...

The #BEASTLab won second place in the departmental holiday decoration contest!

I have been neglecting Uranus system for a long time now. So I decided to change that. Here's Uranus and Miranda visible above the canyons of Ariel. #SciArt #spaceart #astronomy #solarsystem #Uranus

He's not, because the processing of Santa Claus's own "naughty or nice" data is necessary for the performance of a task carried out by Santa as a competent authority. (DPA 2018 s35(2))

No idea what's going on with elusive #exoring #J1407b but here's a possibility which I don't think has been entirely ruled out yet, which I call the "Dark Bramble hypothesis".

I always chuckle at this: I got two embargoed press releases today (meaning reporters can't write about them until a certain date) for papers that are both public on arXiv and have been for weeks. We really need to fix this system. #scicomm

today mood

I tried to make a joke about differential calculus, but in the end it just disintegrated.

Still one of my favourites after all this time. Sólstafir: “Ótta”

POV-Ray

By 2040, ~40% of the images from Hubble Space Telescope, and more than 96% from new and future space telescopes like SPHEREx, ARRAKIHS, and Xuntian will be contaminated by internet satellite constellations. Read our new NASA article in Nature: nature.com/articles/s4158…

Somehow I never noticed that the rules of variable star designations would result in a star called X TrA.

For those who, like me, love speculative and alien evolution, there's a remarkable new book out, "Wildlife on the Planet Furaha" by Gert van Dijk. www.crowood.com/book/wildlif...

Alt text for those who need it. This is amazing.

Checking the equivalent settings in LibreWolf, it looks like most of these are already disabled by default, with the exceptions of: •browser.ml.chat.page •browser.ml.chat.page.footerBadge •browser.ml.chat.page.menuBadge •extensions.ml.enabled •browser.search.visualSearch.featureGate

oh dear chulhu the nineties were 35 years ago /me: crumbles to dust