Good morning from war-torn SF!

@jik my bet is 1) AI slop, and 2) fictitious LinkedIn profile

I can't see anybody being actually at Google for 20 years and doing this (or tbh still being there; I would have cashed out and retired 5-10 years ago if I had equity from 20 years back) ... but like all big orgs, Google now contains […]

@ai6yr as Schneier once said, "It is poor civic hygiene to install technologies that could someday facilitate a police state”

... and *boy* do we need a shower up in here.

@ai6yr on iPhones at least in the last several years, off isn't really off (for "Find My" purposes) unless you take an additional step. I'm not sure if it's possible to completely shut off all Tx/Rx capability while still having it powered on, but I bet somebody somewhere has done a writeup on it.

@jik AI slop is likely, but supply chain shenanigans wouldn't be unheard of

@ai6yr show up at The Oaks the night before and park outside, then walk? Or ride a bike I suppose …

(shout out bike tooters! :D)

now do this in the US <3
https://mastodon.scot/@ScottishGreens/115340198247790818

presented without comment (although look at the publication date, and realize this is an evergreen eternal headline) https://theonion.com/ceo-unveils-bold-new-plan-to-undo-damage-from-last-year-1819579811/

great presentation from Siddharta Jayanti at Dartmouth on the topic

I've been thinking about the implications of CAP Theorem in the context of orbital mesh compute (more latency, less reliability of any single node in a mesh, no guaranteed responses) for a while now, but I had not considered relativistic effects (when we start managing distributed compute in e.g […]

IBGYBG (from finance): Initialism of “I'll be gone, you'll be gone" https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/IBG_YBG

suuuuper interesting talk from ISOC Interplanetary Chapter right now on relativistic considerations for interplanetary networks and distributed computing (I didn't receive notice in my email until half an hour after the talk began, but it should be available for replay later) […]

“And so if you go around saying “we are building a product that has a 20% chance of wiping out humanity, tee hee,” and then the next day you go to your insurance broker and inquire about pricing for wipe-out-humanity insurance, your broker will say “let’s see, 20% times all of the wealth in the […]

@paulehoffman @sophieschmieg "Can we avoid repeating this failure if we don't at least give somebody the side eye?"

also in Nobel Week 2025 (because I missed this Monday), the prize in Medicine has been awarded (again to a trio of scientists!) for key discoveries around "peripheral immune tolerance” -- how our immune systems know to attack germs and not our own bodies.

"The work by Mary E. Brunkow, Fred […]

Nobel Week continues with the Chemistry prize going to three scientists “for the development of metal-organic frameworks" with applications like carbon capture, harvesting water from air, and separating pollutants from water.

The chair of the award committee compared the structures to Mary […]

Qualcomm acquires Arduino: https://www.qualcomm.com/news/releases/2025/10/qualcomm-to-acquire-arduino-accelerating-developers--access-to-i

I wonder what this will mean for hobbyists (Qualcomm is a significant part of the San Diego tech landscape too, so local-ish interest to me as well and /cc […]

“Blade Runner”, but with less rain
https://apple.news/AR9JvdpVxQHuiEcKL98tMPw

#quantum and #space intersection: Researchers from Toshiba Europe and Heriot-Watt University have developed a 2-Gbps quantum random number generator that is compact, lightweight, and energy-efficient enough for satellites. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41534-025-01100-2

I remember being so proud to learn that neural networks I worked on were helping Professor Hawking (with whom I had mutual friends) write his final book.

A few years later, as part of my dissertation research, I learned about the ugly culture of mocking disabled people with disturbing jokes […]

AI Art commentary by Matthew Inman of The Oatmeal

https://theoatmeal.com/comics/ai_art

I just got this ad on Reddit. This is fine. It’s fine.

Mapping deportations invites you to see the history of U.S. immigration enforcement not as a series of disconnected events, but as a pattern. For more than two centuries, U.S. immigration enforcement has favored Europeans and their descendants while targeting non-white migrants for exclusion […]

tfw the context switching between projects is almost a full-time job all by itself