@osma@mas.to avatar

osma

@osma@mas.to

Also at: https://fishpool.org/@osma@fishpool.org/ (self-hosted) https://me.dm/@osma (Medium) https://pixelfed.social/osma (Pictures)

Systems, organizations, products, platforms, software, science, and a little bit of politics. Whatever you think I identify with, I probably don't.

This profile is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.

osma, to solar
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No need to clear new land for solar power. Panels can coexist with agriculture, and even help it since many crops thrive in partial shade and/or benefit from water retention under the panels.

“Maize is grown by about 50% of farmers in Tanzania. Maize is also a sun loving plant. So the fact that we had an 11% yield increase in maize [under solar panel arrays] is a phenomenal result,” he said.

https://apnews.com/article/climate-beer-solar-panels-hops-germany-ee3d00a1877837eb85053335e3b68a00

osma, to random
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Sometimes it's still possible to be shocked by a new visualization of the impact of our climate inaction. This chart is such a shocker.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/ng-interactive/2024/may/08/hopeless-and-broken-why-the-worlds-top-climate-scientists-are-in-despair

osma, to random
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There used to be a city here. People are now debating whether an invader does or does not hold all of the territory the city used to contain. It doesn't matter, for there is no city here any more. What matters is that the invader is evicted and made to bear responsibility for what they have done.

osma, to random
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12 years ago, a man set of a car bomb and opened fire against teenagers on a summer camp on a Norwegian island of , killing 77 people. The man turned out to have written a racist manifesto naming the current Speaker of the Finnish Parliament as one of his inspirations regarding his "great replacement" delusions. The party members of the Speaker, including their current party leader and Minister of Finance, still refer to this theory in their political motivations.

osma, to random
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It won't cease to be amazing that we've built a spacecraft able to fly so close to the sun it can actually pass through a coronal mass ejection with matter flying past it over 1000 km/s and not only survive, but send us back observation data on what's going on in such an event.

Doubly interesting to me because my grandpa was a Sun-specializing astronomer. I have many memories of him poring through observation data on big stacks of printout in the early 80s.
https://www.jhuapl.edu/news/news-releases/230915b-nasa-parker-probe-close-encounter-with-coronal-mass-ejection-cme

osma, to random
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Finally someone writes what should have been the obvious approach to using frozen russian assets for Ukraine's support: issue bonds with those assets as the collateral, use their interest proceeds to service the debt.

Eventually russia will lose and international courts will decide on reparations, which will settle the matter. But until then, this is what the debt market exists for.
https://www.economist.com/leaders/2024/02/28/how-to-put-russias-frozen-assets-to-work-for-ukraine?utm_medium=social-media.content.np&utm_source=twitter&utm_campaign=editorial-social&utm_content=discovery.content

osma, to random
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First I hear about EU's intention to force all browsers to accept state-mandated certificate authorities which would enable those same states to subvert TLS encryption at will. This is super dangerous and must not pass. Thanks @mozilla for the heads up!
https://last-chance-for-eidas.org/

osma, to fediverse
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Random ideas for special-purpose ActivityPub services that are not Mastodon, but you could subscribe to at will:

  1. Sports league game updates
  2. Stock market opening and closing prices, significant movement
  3. Weather cameras in your region
  4. Your own doorway security camera
  5. Traffic disruptions in your region
  6. Public transit schedule changes
  7. New and updated tasks in your project management or source control tools
osma, to random
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Such a brilliant hack! Someone built a mechanical watch into the case of a broken Apple Watch - including hooking up the "digital crown" to do its analog counterpart's job of winding and time setting.
https://www.instructables.com/Mechanical-Apple-Watch-From-Real-E-Waste-Apple-Wat/

osma, to random
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In the "failed" counteroffensive, Ukraine has, so far:

  • destroyed two warships and one submarine
  • and 4000 russian tanks and armoured vehicles
  • and another 4000 artillery systems
  • forced the russian navy to back out of Crimean bases
  • made air bases in Zaporizhia and Donestk Oblasts untenable for russian aviation
  • crossed the Dnipro in Kherson Oblast
  • caused a 15% interest rate in russia
  • made russia dependent on north korea for its ammunition

osma, to random
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Imagine living life peacefully in your home in a European capital city, and then waking up in the middle of the night to an explosion, shattering glass and the horns of car alarms. Then imagine that your neighbor Europeans would hem and haw about helping to drive away the invader, their bombs, rapists and child abductors.
By @timkmak
https://counteroffensive.substack.com/p/how-it-feels-to-barely-survive-a

osma, to random
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One of the exciting features of the EU DSA is that it mandates services to disclose their European userbase by country, and for social media service also to reveal the size of their moderation staff. @mathver has dug up some interesting details from those reports - here's his Xitter thread about it.

TikTok has 1.5 million Finnish (logged in) users and 40 Finnish-speaking moderators.
SnapChat has 1.9 million and 12.
X? 900k and 0.
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1720768631741575414.html

osma, to random
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This hack isn't limited to just the 14,000 people 23andMe claimed, nor even to the 6.9 million (half their total userbase) that this article outlines - it also indirectly exposes every known relative of those 6.9 million, even though they signed up for nothing. That non-consensual profiling is the real issue with all these services.
https://techcrunch.com/2023/12/04/23andme-confirms-hackers-stole-ancestry-data-on-6-9-million-users/

osma, (edited ) to philosophy
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How DMCA and EUCD render all consumer bills entirely worthless - another @pluralistic essay. I'm an optimist, so I want to think that at least @EU_Commission which put forward the EU right to repair proposal AND can amend the EUCD could fix this. It's somewhat harder in the USA, where right to repair is legislated on state level, but DMCA is federal.
I'm also a realist, so I know that's not gonna happen any time soon.
https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/22/vin-locking/#thought-differently

osma, to random
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Justin Ling's third dispatch from Kyiv offers insight that is too often ignored:

"The right word, I think, is frustrated. Frustrated that they have wound up here, frustrated that there are no good options ahead, frustrated that their allies have grown bored of supporting their struggle, frustrated that huge swaths of the country lay in ruin, frustrated that imperialism is on the march and all the flowery promises about democracy and freedom have meant so very little."
https://www.bugeyedandshameless.com/p/from-the-kyiv-jellyfish-museum

osma, (edited ) to random
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Dutch service social.edu.nl for and by Dutch research and education is candidate for the European Commission Open Source Observatory award and a good template for other education communities - I hope the Finnish institutions follow suit.
https://www.surf.nl/en/news/mastodon-pilot-has-a-chance-to-win-open-source-award

osma, (edited ) to random
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Between all the ways Amazon has already been shit for years, this new one is my absolute favorite, because it's shit up front, not after you already were mislead to make a purchase of a shitty product.

https://arstechnica.com/ai/2024/01/lazy-use-of-ai-leads-to-amazon-products-called-i-cannot-fulfill-that-request/

osma, to random
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I guess thanks to the Reddit drama, people seem to be discovering Lemmy. That's cool.

For a certain personality type, following topics instead of people is ideal. Another absolutely sees the world through connections with people. There's nothing wrong with either viewpoint.

The reason Twitter was so interesting was that by some happenstance combined with competitive pressure from Facebook, they managed to come up with "Interest Graph", combining both. It wasn't perfect, but it was unique.

osma, to random
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Macron (France) is turning around their boneheaded stance that all European funded ammunition supply to Ukraine would have to come from European production that doesn't exist yet. Way late, too late for thousands of defenders who paid for this gap wiith their lives, but hopefully still better late than never.

And if this boots on the ground part actually would mean, like NATO air surveillance and defense, that'd make a LOT of sense to me.
https://www.politico.eu/article/emmanuel-macron-doesnt-rule-out-sending-troops-to-ukraine-ammo/?utm_source=flipboard&utm_medium=activitypub

osma, to random
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Basically, expect that any organization using Office 365 has been compromised beyond repair.

Too bad that involves nearly everyone, making it Too Big to Be Compromised.
https://arstechnica.com/security/2024/01/in-major-gaffe-hacked-microsoft-test-account-was-assigned-admin-privileges/

osma, to random
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As Finland battens down for a big storm front, nuclear reactors throttle power. Not because they're in any kind of threat from the storm, but because wind power is predicted to make new record and electricity price is again near zero.
https://www.fingrid.fi/en/electricity-market/power-system/

osma, to random
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WaPo has a significant article on russian influence operations on US politics wrt support for Ukraine - outlining how easily kremlin trolls have been able to lead the conversation.

Due to the impact of the story, a paywall-less archive of the article: https://archive.is/MQBjt
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2024/04/08/russia-propaganda-us-ukraine/

osma, to Ukraine
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It's been over a month since Rep McGovern started his discharge petition to bypass Mike Johnson in the US Congress and get the support package for Ukraine rolling again. In the meantime, the House has mostly just vacationed, while russia bombards Ukrainian cities and energy infrastructure. The petiton is up to 195 of the 218 names needed for majority.

It's not just Johnson. Most of the representatives don't care.


https://clerk.house.gov/DischargePetition/2024031209?CongressNum=118

osma, to Ukraine
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US Air Force is buying add-on seekers designed to give JDAM-ER glide bombs supplied to Ukraine the ability to zero in on GPS jammers. This would turn one of the weapons most impacted by this countermeasure into one used to directly attack it.

https://www.twz.com/air/jdam-er-winged-bombs-with-seekers-that-home-in-on-gps-jammers-headed-to-ukraine

osma, to fediverse
@osma@mas.to avatar

A few days ago I suggested that once Meta's Threads launches, its focus probably will be in groups - either public or semi-private. The details of what that could mean are in this thread.
https://social.fishpool.org/@osma@fishpool.org/posts/193897234189601792/

Earlier, I asked why Strava hasn't integrated with .
https://mas.to/@osma/110371213306088525

Now, consider these two items in combination. A lot of athletes are sharing their training and competition diaries with fans in apps like Strava as well as Instagram. AP could link them together.

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