A few months ago, @parisba and I adopted a little dog, Ruby. She is our best little friend and a truly beloved addition to our home. She came from a litter of three. Her brother went to a young penpal of mine on a Bass Strait island.
Yesterday we saw a familiar face in a post from a local dog’s home. Ruby’s third littermate Rosie has been surrendered at just four months of age. I can’t help but think of all the love we have for Ruby in our home and how Rosie didn’t get to have the same. Feel guilty for not picking her, all sorts. Heartbreaking 💔
Earlier this year, I was invited to speak at ABC’s Ockham’s Razor LIVE. The guidance was to speak on a topic you’re passionate about, but ideally focus on problems that people can do something about. So I spoke about aspects of #SpaceJunk I don’t often get to: the contributions of (and further potential for) citizen science 🛰️
While devising my masterplan for the OOO part of the year, I decided maybe auto-response asking important queries to be directed to a single email address (like some.ooo.prefix@domain…) that allowed breakthrough to SMS forward would be the ultimate in not having to open my inbox at all over the holidays.
But it looks like email-to-SMS gateways are just not a thing that Australian carriers do anymore. I thought maybe my Fastmail plan might have some functionality for it on their side? Nope. Maybe I can just email to my iMessage address? Nope.
Surely there is an option for this that is not “pay some unrecognisable middleman company to provide completely un-auth-ed forwarding”?
@chrisjrn the thought of paying by message to something publicly accessible is a bit scary - the two halves of the equation, email and SMS, are products I pay high but fixed rates for having unlimited amounts of - but it does look possible.
I’ll have a read what their protections are for people just spamming you to cost you money. Thanks!
In which I identify ways adoptees are mis-using a radio astronomy data format standard through either misunderstanding of the spec or inconsistencies in related software. Recommendations highlight how consistency doesn’t come from clear specifications alone—it must sit alongside support and continuous communication about the purpose and correct use of the format as it evolves.
> “Apple joins AI fray with release of model framework”—The Verge
Given that four years ago I managed to write a 500-page book on all the tools Apple had made and all the things you could do with AI on Apple Platforms (and had to cut content to even fit that), these headlines about MLX feel a bit unkind to all the efforts made up until now… 🤔
lutruwita/Tasmania is home to some amazing geology, and being a space nerd it’s easy to have a favourite rock here: Darwin Glass. This tektite was formed by a melted mix of terrestrial and extra-terrestrial materials, as a result of the heat and pressure of a large meteorite impact.
It’s part of the unique and beautiful landscape of the west coast, formed an important tool-making material for the Tasmanian Aboriginal peoples of the region, and requires a treacherous hike into dense snake-filled rainforest—that has long gone undisturbed—to acquire.
Today, some arrived from one of the only retailers able to sell the material in Tas. It is intended to become part of an exhibit on the geological record at our planned space-themed community science centre 🪨☄️💎
@TheMartianLife cool!
Your wording made me think: when does "extraterrestrial" become "terrestrial"? Like the whole planet was formed from space, so at what point do we say "alright, that's enough matter from space; anything henceforth is 'extra'?" 🤔
Brand Tasmania’s “Little Tasmanian” campaign looks at childhood in Tassie. They gather info, provide services, and wrote a children’s book about Tasmanians. They also do spotlights on locals who do youth-facing work, and I was one of them.
From all my rambling interviews about science, the writers extracted a thoughtful story about small gestures that meant the most to me as a child, and what I want to share onward to others as a science communicator 🪐
Surprising no-one, paying academics less for more insecure jobs teaching dumber material to increasingly checked-out students makes them no longer able or willing to properly quality control their output.
> “Academics consider using ChatGPT to generate feedback, with marking time at University of Tasmania college slashed” via ABC Hobart
oh good, now they’re coming for autistic people’s right to drive, saying we have unique tendencies that make us worse at tasks and a danger to others. nobody could have seen that coming…
@mattcen I was living (and driving) in Queensland when they first made this law, but at least it was vague and unenforced.
Looks like rather than stepping up driver fitness regulations overall (e.g. re-test and -license everyone every few years), they’re just going down the list of people they can pick on without consequences—so they look like they’re doing something about road safety.
Over time, I use more and more programming languages in my work. Most contracts I do require two or three, every so often I get to try one I haven’t used before. Most days lately I work across four or five in the same day. And yet, one of them is always Python.
Like sand, #Python really does get everywhere... 🐍💪
…updating old MATLAB code? Well, nobody has licenses anymore [so you should probably port it to Python].
…a basic shell utility? ___ [Might as well make it Python, since anyone who uses it will have Python installed anyway and then at least they’ll know how to modify it for their needs].
🛰️ I have a job where I work with systems and data from radio telescopes to track satellites.
📡 I have another job where I operate radio telescopes to collect data for geodesy, astronomy, etc.
Today, for the first time, I operated a radio telescope to collect my own data for my own experiments. It’s such a small thing but… it’s weirdly exciting to have done the whole process myself?
> "Just as GitHub was founded on Git, today we are re-founded on Copilot."
Look, I respect the heck out of the technical implementation of LLMs, but let's be honest: statistically they produce average code at best and misunderstood/invalid code most often. They re-implement old bugs and obfuscate programmer intent and anyone who is leaning on them for more than a pair assist is making software harder for the rest of us.
The problem is even worse for niche or domain-specific tools, because Copilot acts like it knows what they are - even when it has little to no examples to draw from.
The amount of people showing up in the #YarnSpinner Discord and similar spaces, trying to get other people to spend their free time debugging code the "author" themselves don't understand and couldn't be bothered writing has already exceeded my quota for giving a f*ck about this whole debacle.