It's upside down world. #resist
Astro imaging under #MountPearl suburban light dome Bortle 5/6.
Or sometimes #TerraNovaNP #darkskypreserve Bortle 2.
#nlwx weather geek by necessity.
#nlastro
If you're an American, I'd like you to watch Alec from Technology Connection here starting at about 1:16:30 (link contains jump to that time).
Ideally of course watch the whole video too, but the end here is I think really important because there's so few people who saying this so clearly.
It is amazing to me how many radio/telegraphy/communications museums or historic sites there are in #Newfoundland :
Signal Hill (St. John's)
Heart's Content Cable Station (Heart's Content)
Admiralty House (Mount Pearl)
Marconi Wireless Interpretation Centre (Fogo Island)
Myrick Wireless Interpretation Centre (Cape Race)
I think that's all of them, but maybe there are more sites to visit - there were a lot of Marconi stations on the island per my limited research
https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/30/zucksauce/
βAdblocking isn't stealing. Adblocking is bargaining. Without adblocking, the companies don't sell us services in exchange for our privacy β they plunder all the private data they can get, and dribble out services at whatever level they think we deserve.β @pluralistic
As ICE terrorizes communities, crypto executives who spent years posting about freedom have gone conspicuously silent. But behind the scenes, theyβve contributed at least $315 million β more than double their record 2024 spending β to elect more lawmakers to enable this administration.
https://www.citationneeded.news/issue-100/
#crypto #cryptocurrency #USpol #USpolitics #CitationNeededNewsletter
"This week, the World Economic Forum came out with a report titled βClear Orbit, Secure Future: A Call to Action on #SpaceDebris.β The reportβs findings are, well, expensive. Even without any major collisions in orbit, WEFβs orbital population model projects that congestion in space will cost industry between $25.8B and $42.3B over the next decade. A destructive collision would send that number skyrocketing."
https://payloadspace.com/wefs-space-debris-report-projects-significant-costs/
Big Tech: "Introducing AI that can hallucinate answers to questions you didn't ask"
Vivaldi: "We made the most advanced tab multitasking system ever builtβ
Big Tech: "But AI is the futureβ¦."
Vivaldi: "Cool. Our future includes a browser the user controls, and it shipped today"
Big Tech: "You're missing the pointβ¦."
Vivaldi: "You're missing the download link"
Vivaldi 7.8. No bullshit. Just love for tabs and our users
https://vivaldi.com/blog/vivaldi-on-desktop-7-8/
All-in-one astro imaging software promises to make processing a breeze. We got our expert to try it out
https://www.skyatnightmagazine.com/reviews/on1-photo-raw-2025-2-software?utm_source=flipboard&utm_medium=activitypub
Posted into Astrophotography @astrophotography-skyatnightmag
It was interesting to read up on the AI assisted code review at https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/7aJwgbMEiKq5egQbd/ai-found-12-of-12-openssl-zero-days-while-curl-cancelled-its
For context: I'm personally responsible for at least 29 curl CVEs. Out of the recent 6 CVEs mentioned in the blog post I found two. This gives me some perspective, I think.
I do not utilise AI tools in my vulnerability research. I am also fiercely critical of harmful proliferation of AI. This is due to the unsustainable way it is currently pushed, and use of as marketing ploy and gimmick rather than producing measurable benefit to users. This leads to negative impacts on economy, education & learning, not to mention impacts to nature due to wasteful use of energy.
This doesn't mean I am against AI. I have written by own AI tooling (fully local RAG with support for arbitrary number of models running on local nodes, implemented in python). I found the usefulness of such tool to be limited at best. It is somewhat useful in mass analysis of large document bases, but the level of analysis is superficial at best. These AI models are after all just language models, and do not have any true understanding or intelligence.
And here is the gist of it: The current tools are not intelligent. Understanding this limitation is the key of successful deployment and utilisation of AI tools. The tools can be useful in certain tasks, but they do not replace true intelligence.
The AI tooling AISLE are developing certainly is one of the better uses of AI, and definitely surpasses all my personal dabbling around it. It is clear that the tool does find vulnerabilities. The key question is how much hallucinations and false positives it produces: If the tool generates thousands of FPs and the true findings are hidden among them this limits the value and usefulness of the tool (of course it doesn't entirely negate it, many tools produce false positives). In short: The quality of the findings is key, and poor signal-to-noise ratio is highly undesirable.
Either way, I think there is a future for AI tools and they definitely will be helpful in vulnerability research.
I personally will keep exercising my wetware for this work, however.
#cybersecurity #infosec #vulnerabilityresearch #thoughtoftheday
What this means is that Duck Duck Go, alongside basically every search engine that is not google, has completely delisted Neocities.
Which feels like something a lot of y'all should know!
https://blog.neocities.org/blog/2026/01/27/bing-block
Update: DuckDuckGo at least has fixed this issue, likely thanks to some folks making a good kind of ruckus! Still, I hope this has informed people how much of a pain Bing can be with this kind of thing in general.
The U.S. @ntsb_newsroom has released a rendering of the Potomac River mid-air collision last year between American Airlines Flight 5342 and a United States Army Sikorsky UH-60 Black Hawk helicopter.
It highlights how difficult it was for the pilots of AAL5342 to see the helicopter against the city lights of Washington, D.C. And it seems fair to conclude that light pollution was a contributing factor to the accident.
If you write about the messy reality behind "free" internet services: we're seeing #OpenStreetMap hammered by scrapers hiding behind residential proxy/embedded-SDK networks. We're a volunteer-run service and the costs are real. We'd love to talk to a journalist about what we're seeing + how we're responding. #AI #Bots #Abuse
Last year, a human trafficking victim trapped in a crypto scam compound in the Golden Triangle region of Laos contacted me. He proceeded to leak to me a huge collection of the compound's internal materials.
Then he had to get out alive. This is his story.
@pluralistic It's amazing that when I click your articles the site loads almost instantly and I can use reader mode on the browser for a no distraction dark mode reading experience. And then I get sad that virtually no other websites give me that super useful and snappy experience because they've all been so thoroughly enshittified. The internet could be so fast and useful and we've just chosen not to do that.
"Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us." - Carl Sagan.
π· :https://science.nasa.gov/mission/voyager/voyager-1s-pale-blue-dot/
#astrophotography #space #science #AstroDon #earth #Voyager1 #astronomy
In unrelated news, Microsoft is asking Microsoft Windows users to uninstall a recent Microsoft Windows update, issued and published by Microsoft, because said update is breaking Microsoft Windows.
https://www.windowscentral.com/microsoft/windows-11/microsoft-urges-uninstalling-the-update-kb5074109-after-bug-reports-on-windows-11-heres-how
Every single piece about this should be mentioning Satya Nadella bragging how 30% of new Microslop code is AI-generated:
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/04/29/satya-nadella-says-as-much-as-30percent-of-microsoft-code-is-written-by-ai.html
Not providing this context is journalistic malpractice.
Henry A. Wallace, as Vice President of the USA in 1944:
> "The American fascists are most easily recognized by their deliberate perversion of truth and fact. Their newspapers and propaganda carefully cultivate every fissure of disunity β¦ They claim to be super-patriots, but they would destroy every liberty guaranteed by the Constitution. They demand free enterprise, but are the spokesmen for monopoly and vested interest.
[contd]
This is a good, albeit high-level, look at government Internet shutdowns by Jacqueline Cole for The Counteroffensive. It focuses on Iran but looks at the implications for other countries. More like this, please.
https://www.counteroffensive.news/p/how-irans-internet-blackouts-work
Ps: I was surprised that Starlink and other satellite technologies didnβt get discussed β¦ but then again SpaceX is a whole βnother can of worms.
Has anyone realized that you could post your videos to your Peertube and have YouTube pull them in via the Podcast RSS Feed? Or am I the only one that didn't realize this?
Which means you don't have to upload to YouTube AND Peertube. You can upload to Peertube and YouTube will grab it for you.
This of course only applies to those that WANT their content on YouTube. If you don't, that's totally fine. I'm doing this to advocate for the Fediverse so I think it's a necessary evil.
