• 116 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • Some highlights if you don’t want to click:

    Temperatures are forecast to be warmer than normal for all of the northern U.S., from northern California, Oregon and Washington to Pennsylvania, New York and into New England.

    NOAA says that temperatures will stay closer to the 30-year average for the South.

    For the precipitation (rain, snow, sleet, etc.), the northern states could see below-normal snowfall, especially in the northern Rockies and the Great Lakes.

    Across most of the South, wetter than normal conditions are expected, especially in the Southeast from Louisiana to Florida and into the Carolinas.

    For the Northeast, there is a chance that this will be a wetter than normal winter from Washington, D.C., to Philadelphia, to New York City and into southern New England.

    super important detail

    One other thing to note, this is all a probability forecast. The atmosphere is very fluid and dynamic, and forecasts could change.




















  • That’s a decent start, but you need a browser that’s resistant to fingerprinting through some plugins and something like ublock origin that will block all embedded content. At some point, it may require you to use a phone number, and at that point you may have a problem. If you avoid that, one of the biggest threats are the facebook and related meta content placed on other pages around the internet. The pixel is one aspect, but almost any facebook content can still track you across sites. These are easily blocked with a decent adblocker and probably privacybadger too.

    I know lots of folks will disagree, but I’d care less about Facebook tracking you as they mostly only care about serving you ads and making content suggestions to keep you on the platform to view more ads. Facebook has never served me a relevant ad, and even with a lot of use still can’t recommend things I’m interested in. Data leaks and sharing is a concern, but that’s a concern with every site. I think when it comes to privacy, there’s far bigger concerns.




  • This was the intent of the inquiries.

    However, I think the title is a bit misleading. I wouldn’t say the research is “buckling”. It’s definitely been a headache, and sure there are some people who would rather not deal with the ever-increasing death threats, but that applies to many areas of research.

    The question is how they’re going to try and stop funding research into this. The research around this is especially important from a national security perspective, because it’s become easier than ever to slide propaganda into social media and news media. If you’ve got enough resources, you can likely sway elections even easier than before.



  • This has arguably always been the case. A century ago, it could take years to get something published and into a book form such that it could be taught, and even then it could take an expert to interpret it to a layperson.

    Today, the expert can not only share their research, they can do interviews and make tiktok videos about a topic before their research has been published. If it’s valuable, 500 news outlets will write clickbait, and students can do a report on it within a week of it happening.

    A decent education isn’t about teaching you the specifics of some process or even necessarily the state-of-the-art, it’s about teaching you how to learn and adapt. How to deal with people to get things accomplished. How to find and validate resources to learn something. Great professors at research institutions will teach you not only the state-of-the-art, but the opportunities for 10 years into the future because they know what the important questions are.






  • Many folks running instances take donations. Folks are happy to toss up a few bucks to help cover costs. Similar to how people are happy to hop on patreon and support whatever creators on a monthly basis. That’s where a lot of the core mastodon money comes from. There’s also grants from orgs and governments too to contribute.

    This isn’t a new concept, and the internet has always had services that worked like this. Usenet, mirrored file repositories, etc. It wasn’t until the early 2000s that many things started to become centralized, and we see how well that’s worked out.