Tonight’s task: set up a laptop that I’m not using for my Masters degree to learn how to I.T.

@Anonyops lol hai

@Anonyops heh. Sabu once offered me tickets to an Immortal Technique (I turned him down)

@asherwolf I haven't even given OpenAI my credit card yet, and I 100% intend on using it going forward!

It's evil as hell to ask for a credit card up front. We recently got dinged to the turn of $470 by an auto-enrollment of an Adobe student subscription on an account we forgot we had on an email we forgot we had. Got the money back after begin told by corporate that it was impossible to get the money back, zero use of the product in a year+.

If you enjoy someone's post on #Mastodon go ahead and click the star. If someone tells you that's meaningless because there's no #algorithm, ignore them. Sure, boost the post too if you want others to also see the post, but don't think telling someone you like what they posted is somehow unimportant. In real life I don't tell someone, "good job," or "well said," or "I love that," for the sake of some algorithm, I do it because I'm human and they are too. It's fundamental to being truly social.

If you read #Reddit but do not comment, a #privacy oriented alternative is #Teddit.

Just replace 'reddit' with 'teddit' in the URL. For example:

https://reddit.com/r/mastodon

becomes

https://teddit.net/r/mastodon

This is absolutely wild: a Nepali student who flew to the UK to take up a university scholarship with a valid visa and proof of his uni place was detained at the border and held in custody for 12 days, leading to him losing his place.

Adding insult to injury, while a spelling mistake in his bank letter was part of the reason for disbelieving him, the Border Force's letter to him made several spelling mistakes https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2022/nov/26/treated-like-a-criminal-nepali-student-wrongly-detained-at-uk-border-loses-uni-place

@asherwolf I know it was inevitable that it became corporatized in the way it is with all the problems that come with that but its such a shame. Coursera was so fun back in the day when they were offering courses that granted no certificate and were in fields like World Music.

The only thing I resent more than being asked for a credit card for a ‘free trial’ is Coursera requiring biometrics to verify my ID for certificates to count towards degree programs

Carl Sagan, brilliant guy.

#carlsagan #books #philosophy

Good morning my friends
Supernumerary Rainbows over New Jersey https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap221127.html #APOD

Sent a “just wondering if you’d had a chance to mark my essay” email to the lecturer who said on the 11th she’d have my paper back in the next few days. I didn’t want to send that email but… pass grade is a prerequisite for next year’s subjects

Me, your amusement, courtesy of exhaustion due to workforce shortage

Very silly overtired thing happened: I couldn’t find my car keys. This was the same service station where we lost the rfid transponder for the car keys. Anyway, my keys were in my pocket. The entire staff hollered and hooted laughing. Ohmigods

If you want to customise the look and feel of your Mastodon, there are loads of themes and skins you can choose.

This site has a great collection, even one that mirrors the Twitter design. That's for nostalgia buffs haha :birdsite:

https://userstyles.org/styles/browse/mastodon

@shardsofblue @dosboi @blindscribe hello! I’m one of the mod/admins of weirder.earth and yeah this was an issue we ran into. We noticed that our mod staff was totally white and we felt like we were not doing a good job of handling issues around racism and anti-blackness in particular so we made a conscious effort to recruit POC and black moderators (including creating a Patreon to compensate said moderators). Deliberately increasing the diversity of our team was one of the best decisions we ever made and I would highly recommend it for any other instance.

Server Belgian local police zone hacked, data leaked from 16 years including staff files, warrants, child abuse images. https://www.vrt.be/vrtnws/nl/2022/11/24/hacking-politie-zwijndrecht/

Economics: Humans only value things monetarily.
Sociology: Uh, I don't ...
Economics: Humans are always rational and value is calculated by a complex inner calculus.
Sociology: Uh, Psy, can you help?
Psychology: That's not how humans ...
Economics: ALSO MY SYSTEM WILL GROW EXPONENTIALLY FOREVER!!
Physics: *drops teacup*

He’s not gonna win and he does not deserve to win, I witnessed those online classes after school and yeah, they had fun and stuffed around talking about their biology geek interests, but he’s not the mentee of the year, lol

Nice piece of afternoon news: Kid has been nominated as a finalist in the In2Science Mentee of the Year awards https://in2science.org.au/