Gaurav Vaidya
LightNews LightNews
banner
gaurav.hachyderm.io.ap.brid.gy
Gaurav Vaidya
@gaurav.hachyderm.io.ap.brid.gy
19 followers 5 following 40 posts
He's just this guy, you know? Semantic web technologist at the Renaissance Computing Institute at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, NC, USA. Edits […]

[bridged from https://hachyderm.io/@gaurav on the fediverse by https://fed.brid.gy/ ]
Posts Replies Media Videos
Reposted by Gaurav Vaidya
nonilex.masto.ai.ap.brid.gy
#mitchmcconnell added: "This is about more than #greenland. It's about more than America's relationship with its highly capable Nordic #allies. It's about whether the #unitedstates intends to face a constellation of strategic adversaries with capable friends ... or commit an unprecedented act of […]
Original post on masto.ai
masto.ai
January 14, 2026 at 6:59 PM
Reposted by Gaurav Vaidya
chgowiz.dice.camp.ap.brid.gy
I had that running on my home and work computer BITD!

https://phys.org/news/2026-01-enthusiasts-home-scientists-homing.html

#seti #setiathome #distributedcomputing
Enthusiasts used their home computers to search for ET—scientists are homing in on 100 signals they found
For 21 years, between 1999 and 2020, millions of people worldwide loaned UC Berkeley scientists their computers to search for signs of advanced civilizations in our galaxy.
phys.org
January 14, 2026 at 2:36 AM
Reposted by Gaurav Vaidya
sundogplanets.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy
Super busy today, but just have to quickly share that this morning, I woke up at a friend's house, under a skylight, and was delighted to see stars above me for nearly the first time this whole BC trip (lots of clouds here)!

And literally 10 seconds later, I saw a fucking Starlink train! […]
Original post on mastodon.social
mastodon.social
January 8, 2026 at 9:27 PM
Reposted by Gaurav Vaidya
timbray.cosocial.ca.ap.brid.gy
Peeking inside the process of how raw camera sensor data gets turned into an image that looks something like what you see: https://maurycyz.com/misc/raw_photo/

h/t @nelson

#photography
What an unprocessed photo looks like
Comments
maurycyz.com
December 30, 2025 at 3:35 PM
Reposted by Gaurav Vaidya
skinnylatte.hachyderm.io.ap.brid.gy
‘How did you know you were autistic’

‘I photocopied every bus pass I ever had and made a zine out of it because I really like buses’
A photo of a photocopied bus pass with my photo on it as a 10 year old child. It has a few stamps denoting the bus pass for that year / month
December 22, 2025 at 4:56 AM
Reposted by Gaurav Vaidya
w7voa.journa.host.ap.brid.gy
The atomic ensemble time scale at the NIST Boulder campus has failed.
December 20, 2025 at 10:54 PM
Reposted by Gaurav Vaidya
w7voa.journa.host.ap.brid.gy
NYT - The Trump administration is providing the names of all travelers passing through US airports to immigration officials in search of people with deportation orders […]
Original post on journa.host
journa.host
December 12, 2025 at 9:21 PM
Reposted by Gaurav Vaidya
sundogplanets.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy
This really highlights how incredibly dependent we are on Starlink's continued perfect collision avoidance maneuvers. So far they've done it, but they keep adding more satellites and making it harder.

Other megaconstellations are now launching as well, and they all need to communicate PERFECTLY […]
Original post on mastodon.social
mastodon.social
December 11, 2025 at 2:33 PM
Reposted by Gaurav Vaidya
mattblaze.federate.social.ap.brid.gy
The late Tom Stoppard, in his play Hapgood, had some good advice for writers of scientific papers.
KERNER: I don’t understand this mania for surprises. If the author knows, it’s rude not to tell. In science this is understood: what is interesting is to know what is happening. When I write up an experiment I do not wish you to be surprised, it is not a joke. This is why a science paper is a beautiful thing: first, here is what we will find; now here is how we find it; here is the first puzzle, here is the answer, now we can move on. This is polite. We don’t save up all the puzzles to make a triumph for the author. Tom Stoppard. Hapgood (Act I, Scene 5). 1988.
December 10, 2025 at 3:22 AM
Reposted by Gaurav Vaidya
acb.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy
Borland TurboVision (the PC text mode windowing UI used in Turbo Pascal/C++) has been open-sourced and updated to work seamlessly on Linux and with Unicode:

https://github.com/magiblot/tvision

It’s all in C++, though if someone hasn’t wrapped it in bindings for Python/Rust/&c. yet, surely they […]
Original post on mastodon.social
mastodon.social
December 6, 2025 at 11:33 AM
Reposted by Gaurav Vaidya
sundogplanets.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy
Every astronomer who complains about satellite streaks has heard the same response from techbro-types: "Why don't you just put all your telescopes in space?"

There are an incredibly large number of reasons why that is totally not going to work. But here's another from Borloff et al "Satellite […]
Original post on mastodon.social
mastodon.social
December 3, 2025 at 9:11 PM
Reposted by Gaurav Vaidya
gedankenstuecke.scholar.social.ap.brid.gy
«Zig quits GitHub, says Microsoft's AI obsession has ruined the service» - welcome to @Codeberg instead 😊

https://www.theregister.com/2025/12/02/zig_quits_github_microsoft_ai_obsession/
Zig quits GitHub, says Microsoft's AI obsession has ruined the service
Comments
www.theregister.com
December 4, 2025 at 2:49 AM
Reposted by Gaurav Vaidya
jik.federate.social.ap.brid.gy
An oldie but a goodie.
#theonion #healthinsurance #Humor
"Insurance Company Annoyed Customer Doesn’t Realize They Were Just Being Polite When They Said They’d Cover Healthcare Bills"
https://theonion.com/insurance-company-annoyed-customer-doesn-t-realize-they-1840508147/
theonion.com
December 3, 2025 at 9:26 PM
Reposted by Gaurav Vaidya
veroniqueb99.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy
December 3, 2025 at 12:23 AM
Reposted by Gaurav Vaidya
nonilex.masto.ai.ap.brid.gy
A confident #farright Alternative for Germany [#AfD] set up its new youth organization on Saturday even as thousands of protesters converged on the city of Giessen, where the party held its meeting, some of them clashing with police.

A convention of the anti-#immigration party, known by its […]
Original post on masto.ai
masto.ai
November 30, 2025 at 8:18 AM
Reposted by Gaurav Vaidya
joshuajfriedman.com
Apologies for the (unpaid!) advertisement, but if you've been tempted to subscribe to the Criterion Channel, I just learned that you can use the code BLACKFRIDAY25 to get 25% off an annual subscription—$75 rather than $100. It's one of the few streaming channels I never regret paying for.
The Criterion Channel
A movie lover’s dream, the Criterion Channel offers classics and discoveries from around the world, thematically programmed with special features, on a streaming service brought to you by the Criterio...
www.criterionchannel.com
November 26, 2025 at 5:35 PM
Reposted by Gaurav Vaidya
mattblaze.federate.social.ap.brid.gy
One of the reasons I'm skeptical of the practicality of e2e verifiable voting schemes is that every system proposed so far is fragile. A single mishap can result in an unverifiable election (and, in worst-case scenarios like this, one in which you can't even determine the winner) […]
Original post on federate.social
federate.social
November 22, 2025 at 9:33 PM
Reposted by Gaurav Vaidya
sundogplanets.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy
yes yes Yes YEs YES YES YES!!!

PURPLE! RED! ORANGE!! GREEN!!! WOWWWW

(It was not this bright naked-eye, but these colours are all totally visible! Incredible!)
A patch of bright auroras, made up of columns that all start bright green at the bottom, transition to orange further up, then bright pink, then purple. There are silhouetted trees in front, and some satellite streaks behind. Similar to the previous picture, but with some more bright green at the very bottom of the sky A patch of bright red and purple on one side of the sky, with bright green on the other, looking a bit swirly. There's silhouetted trees in front of the red, and a silhouetted barn in front of the green. An arc made up of vertical columns of purple, red, and green, with bright green background. There are silhouetted bare trees in one corner of the photo.
November 13, 2025 at 1:39 AM
gaurav.hachyderm.io.ap.brid.gy
I think part of the reason why I just can't love the #paddington movie is that it's sold as an "immigrant comes to the UK" wish fulfillment story when really it's a "British person in a strange land" wish fulfillment story, where they show up with nothing but a fine RP/British accent, are […]
Original post on hachyderm.io
hachyderm.io
November 13, 2025 at 2:47 AM
Reposted by Gaurav Vaidya
nonilex.masto.ai.ap.brid.gy
Ellis appeared to take inspiration from the piece’s interrogation of outsiders’ perceptions of #chicago. For example, Sandburg considers descriptions of the city as “wicked” & “crooked” alongside his view of the town as a place “with lifted head singing so proud to be alive & coarse & strong & […]
Original post on masto.ai
masto.ai
November 11, 2025 at 3:36 PM
Reposted by Gaurav Vaidya
whitequark.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy
reminder that if you want an alternative to GitHub Pages, https://grebedoc.dev might be it
Grebedoc — static site hosting for git forges
grebedoc.dev
November 11, 2025 at 3:00 AM
Reposted by Gaurav Vaidya
kzeta.wikimedia.social.ap.brid.gy
Wikipedia is celebrating its 25th anniversary in January, and our amazing creative teams in the Wikimedia Foundation put together this video that I love.

Fun fact! There are something like 500 attributions for images, sounds, and text in the video 🤯 […]

[Original post on wikimedia.social]
November 10, 2025 at 6:47 PM