Discussion
Why should software paid for by taxpayers stay locked behind proprietary licences?
If it's public money, it should be public code. 🖥️💶
Free Software gives everyone the right to use, study, share and improve it. Plus it is supporting transparency, innovation, and competition..
.
Sign the open letter → https://publiccode.eu/
Harvard is now selling a 700 USD course taught by LLMs trained on their facultiy.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/22/business/dealbook/harvard-ai-faculty.html
(I don't know what's worse: Harvard's open disdain for education and standards or the suckers who pay 700 bucks for it.)
Are conspiracy theorists distinguished more by ideology or something else?
Stanovich & Toplak found belief in secret causes, #religion, and the paranormal predicted discernment between true and false #conspiracyTheories almost as well as #ideology.
Hello Mastodon! 🦣
You’ve waited long enough... Base4NFDI is finally part of the Fediverse. 🥳🎉
Here we'll share:
🔹 Updates on our basic services
🔹 Community events and workshops
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🔹 News about publications and materials
We're looking forward to connecting with this cmmunity.
Short things short: Hello everyone! 👋
#NFDI #OpenScience #RDM #ResearchInfrastructure #Fediverse #Base4NFDI
For.. reasons.. I am making a wealth inequality playlist. I posted an earlier version about 10 hours ago. This is the latest version reflecting everyone's feedback. Remember, I want songs that aren't TOO aggro and could be background-ish at an event, catchy, topical, without making themselves the center of attention. Here's what I have for V2 of the playlist. Please parse this list and suggest along these lines, if you like.
Money itself: the source of, and solution to, all problems
The O’Jays — For the Love of Money
The Flying Lizards — Money (That’s What I Want)
Pet Shop Boys — Opportunities (Let’s Make Lots of Money)
ABBA — Money, Money, Money
Pink Floyd — Money
Depeche Mode — Everything Counts
The O’Jays — Rich Get Richer
Billie Holiday — God Bless the Child
Inherited wealth and class
Kareem Rahma & Tiny Gun — Really Rich Parents
Lorde — Royals
Creedence Clearwater Revival — Fortunate Son
Pulp — Common People
Dolly Parton — Coat of Many Colors
Work, wages, and survival
They Might Be Giants — Minimum Wage
Dolly Parton — 9 to 5
Donna Summer — She Works Hard for the Money
Shakira & Fuerza Regida — El Jefe
Rise Against — Prayer of the Refugee
The Clash — Clampdown
Tennessee Ernie Ford — Sixteen Tons
Desmond Dekker & the Aces — Israelites
UB40 — One in Ten
Simply Red — Money’s Too Tight (to Mention)
Travis Tritt — Lord Have Mercy on the Working Man
The Kinks — Dead End Street
Tracy Chapman — Fast Car
Labor history, dispossession, communities stripped of value
The Staple Singers — When Will We Be Paid
B.B. King — Why I Sing the Blues
Skip James — Hard Time Killing Floor Blues
Bruce Springsteen — I Ain’t Got No Home (written by Woody Guthrie)
Bing Crosby — Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?
Patty Loveless — You’ll Never Leave Harlan Alive
Billy Joel — Allentown
James McMurtry — We Can’t Make It Here
Bruce Springsteen — Death to My Hometown
Poverty, inequality, displacement
Stevie Wonder — Living for the City
Marvin Gaye — Inner City Blues (Make Me Wanna Holler)
Grandmaster Flash & the Furious Five — The Message
Bruce Hornsby and the Range — The Way It Is
Prince — Sign o’ the Times
The Police — Driven to Tears
Bad Bunny — El Apagón
Bob Marley & the Wailers — Them Belly Full (But We Hungry)
The system, the math, and accountability
Pete Seeger — Banks of Marble
Yasiin Bey / Mos Def — Mathematics
Hozier — Eat Your Young
William Shatner featuring Joe Jackson — Common People (produced and arranged by Ben Folds)
Les McCann & Eddie Harris — Compared to What?
Stevie Wonder — You Haven’t Done Nothin’
Closing: Wake up and fight
Johnny Cash — Man in Black
Tracy Chapman — Talkin’ ’bout a Revolution
William Elliott Whitmore — Mutiny
Bob Marley & the Wailers — Get Up, Stand Up
Walk-out coda — after the formal event has ended
Gil Scott-Heron — Whitey on the Moon
@codinghorror Sixteen Tons could be good in here, too. There's the original Ernie Williams, of course, but also great options by The Platters, Johnny Cash, or BB King!
@fahrni It's a line from a novel I really enjoyed.
@hotdogsladies I’ve followed you on Twitter and now here for years and I never knew where that came from. Thanks for the info!
I’m not making fun of it BTW. Just sharing how my weird brain reads it. 😃
I have limited sympathy for charities who trusted Microsoft to look after their data. I can only hope the providers that sold in Microsoft to them looked after them.
My sympathy is particularly limited to those who moved from independent email providers and Free software.
But then budget is often more important than long term relationships.
IT providers and hosting have long been under appreciated and in a race to the bottom.
So here we are.
https://slate.com/technology/2026/08/microsoft-software-nonprofit-data-delete.html
You are about to become the funnest person at typewriter parties
Wäre es der Stadt #Frankfurt eigentlich möglich, bspw. ab kommendem Jahr, bei öffentlichen Veranstaltungen allen Standbetreibern (mit Wasseranschluss) vorzuschreiben, dass sie im Sommer kostenfrei (Leitungs-)Wasser anbieten müssen? Oder gibts da Hindernisse, die ich gerade nicht sehe?
Es kann ja eigentlich nicht sein, dass bei 35° und mehr Mineralwasser für 4€ verkauft wird.
Gerne teilen oder weiterleiten an Stadtverordnete. Sollte sich ja eine Mehrheit in der StVV für finden lassen.
If you’re worried someone you love may have an eating disorder, the fear of saying the wrong thing can make it tempting to say nothing at all.
But it’s both important to speak up, and to do it with compassion.
A dietitian with a personal history of anorexia explains how to express concern without commenting on their body, pushing too hard or causing shame:
https://theconversation.com/if-you-think-someone-has-an-eating-disorder-should-you-say-something-a-dietitian-explains-how-to-express-concern-without-body-shaming-289332
LANGLANDS IS DEAD I'M CALLING IT NOW
The conjectures have evolved since Langlands first stated them.
the real langlands program was the friends we made along the way
What places on Earth are most resilient to global catastrophic risk? Our new review in Global Challenges is the first study to look at this across nuclear war, near-Earth objects, large volcanic eruptions, cyberattacks, high altitude electromagnetic pulse, geomagnetic storms and pandemics.
Australia is plausibly the most resilient place, but even it is reliant on trade for fuel, medicine and fertiliser. There is no place on Earth which is a complete refuge.
Four factors appeared most consistently: geographic isolation, self-sufficiency in food production, governance quality (democratic institutions, low inequality, low corruption, social cohesion) and decentralisation. The first two are largely fixed. The last two are modifiable through policy, improve resilience against every category of catastrophe we examined, and also make societies better places to live. All of them are currently trending the wrong way, which is bad, but also means we can work towards a more resilient and more livable society at the same time.
Open access in Global Challenges: https://doi.org/10.1002/gch2.70146
Longer summary on my blog: https://existentialcrunch.substack.com/p/no-place-to-hide
Data and code: https://github.com/allfed/gcr-resilience-map
#GlobalCatastrophicRisk #NuclearWar #NuclearWinter #Supervolcano #Food #Resilience #Inequality
No Place to Hide? Regional Resilience and Vulnerability to Global Catastrophic Risk
@hochstenbach @raffaele yes, a proof would be hard. I wonder if it's possible to have some kind of statistical measure of how likely either (missing from Common Crawl or Wayback) is to be correct? I suppose now that Common Crawl is loaded into Wayback the former is a subset of the latter?
Versions of this legislation already failed in Australia, failed in the UK, so of course Luxon wants to do it and have it fail here too. 🙄
Evidence-based decisions? Not under their watch!
Govt pushes ahead with social media ban for under-16s
https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/politics/1103002/govt-pushes-ahead-with-social-media-ban-for-under-16s
@pezmico , haha, guess they just want to make sure that future votes are below 30/20% as well.
UGH FINE! I'll do the maths homework!
A post-American, enshittification-resistant internet https://media.ccc.de/v/39c3-a-post-american-enshittification-resistant-internet
There's also a more recent tendency, which i'm sure you're also well aware of Chris - the increasingly technical nature of many businesses in the developed world, requiring academic backgrounds, joint ventures with universities, etc - ie. more overlap with highly educated people - and level of education is very clearly associated with left-leaning now.
yes, although my experience with these businesses is a certain cognitive dissonance between how they see the business interest & how they enact their (left-isn) politics.... not always but more often than one would hope
@Rowena Oh was this photo taken recently? Looks like the picnic tables have been painted white, and there's astroturf on the ground now.
@jpm Haha yes the artificial lawn! Was there two days ago. The pub was doing a roaring lunch trade from 200 visitors who poured off the vintage special train from Seymour.
holy shit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tate's_thesis the most princeton university mathematician type shit ever to occur. under the tutelage of emil artin, he manages to do some bullshit with the zeta function or whatever. then suddenly:
Kenkichi Iwasawa independently discovered essentially the same method (without an analog of the local theory in Tate's thesis) during the Second World War
BUT WAIT THERE'S MORE
In 1972, Roger Godement and Hervé Jacquet extended Iwasawa–Tate theory to the general linear group GL(n, k) over an algebraic number field k, and to automorphic representations of its adelic group, which formed the foundations of the Langlands correspondence.
LANGLANDS IS DEAD I'M CALLING IT NOW
Was ich in letzter Zeit auch immer öfters mache ist, dass Verbinden von #OpenStreetMap mit #wikicommons .
Wenn ich mappe mache ich Fotos von Denkmälern oder anderen Objekten, lade die Fotos in #WikiMedia hoch und setzte dann eine Verlinkung zum OpenStreetMap Node.
Wenn ich mehr Hintergrundinformationen oder mehr Fotos habe mache ich eine #wikidata Seite und verlinke diese mit OpenStreetMap.
Beispiel: Die Uhr im #Eberichpark in #Ebreichsdorf [1] hat eine Wikidata-Seite [2] bekommen und das Bild ist in Wikimedia [3] hochgeladen worden.
[1] https://www.openstreetmap.org/node/13684901190
[2] https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q138827181
[3] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Eberich%20Uhr.jpg?uselang=de
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!["the paranormal beliefs measure and the religiosity measure tended to steal variance from each other in various regression and path models. We thus developed separate models involving each (the model involving paranormal beliefs is presented in Figure 3, and that involving religiosity is presented in Figure 4)."
In Figure 3, "The ability to discriminate true from false conspiracies has a positive independent relationship with AOT, and negative independent relationships with [belief in hidden causal forces or] HCFS, Paranormal Beliefs, and the Government Credulity scale."
In Figure 4, "The ability to discriminate true from false conspiracies has a positive independent relationship with AOT, and negative independent relationships with HCFS, Religiosity, and the Government Credulity scale that were all very similar to the coefficients observed in Figure 3."](https://media.nerdculture.de/media_attachments/files/117/150/173/751/464/709/original/704c8b174d1599a8.png)
!["Table 2 presents the correlations of the predictor variables with the six variables measuring partisan/ideological conspiracy belief. As is apparent, the ideology variable has substantial correlations (although in different directions) with all six of the partisan/ideological conspiracy variables. Some variables, such as the Paranormal Belief [and Religiosity] scale[s], had fairly uniform positive relationships with conspiracy beliefs across the ideological spectrum."](https://media.nerdculture.de/media_attachments/files/117/150/173/750/128/364/original/40b20edaf576c666.png)
