Jonne Arjoranta 📚 @jaranta@scholar.social

The power of game design is to get you emotionally invested in how dicerolls will affect spreadsheets

we are now in the phase of hating computers so much we started making fantasy computers inside our computers

blockchain, n.

The interconnected group of douche bros that you have blocked from your social media accounts

“We examined more than 15,000 recent popular queries and found that Google devoted 41 percent of the first page of search results on mobile devices to its own properties and what it calls ‘direct answers,’ which are populated with information copied from other sources, sometimes without their knowledge or consent.”

https://themarkup.org/google-the-giant/2020/07/28/google-search-results-prioritize-google-products-over-competitors

Why do I feel so strongly positive aabout this action? Data breaches or modification have huge externalities, and insecure-by-default deployments are a huge part of the problem:

One of the first publicly known examples of a Meow attack is an Elasticsearch database belonging to a VPN provider that claimed not to keep any logs.

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2020/07/more-than-1000-databases-have-been-nuked-by-mystery-meow-attack/

Other targets include #MongoDB #Cassandra #CouchDB #Redis #Hadoop #Jenkins, and unsecured network-attached storage devices (NAS).

I just can't get over how great StreetComplete is. It looks fantastic, is incredibly easy to use, and actually makes it fun to contribute data about the Real World for the benefit of everyone.

If you run Android, be sure to give it a try: https://github.com/westnordost/StreetComplete#download #OpenStreetMap #StreetComplete

Yes, Jeff Bezos could unilaterally end all kinds of poverty and homelessness issues, probably with a few key presses, but the planet brain version is that even the world's richest oligarch is a puppet of the general forces of capitalism. If he gave away his wealth then some other oligarch would rise to replace him and without more systemic changes the inequality would soon return again.

Overcoming the current paradigm is not so much about getting rid of Bezos - as tempting as that may be - it requires more general changes in attitudes and beliefs. A loss of faith in the old gods.

"So Much for the Decentralized Internet" by Ian Bogost https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2020/07/twitter-hack-decentralized-internet/614593/

No mention of Mastodon, the fediverse, Scuttlebutt, etc. I guess nobody is trying to solve the problem of centralized social media! The rest of the article is good though.

my two big tips for PhD students:
1. be very skeptical of doing anything that's not putting a roof over your head or going in your dissertation.
2. try to make it so what's paying you is also going into your dissertation.
3. BONUS TIP: it helps if your ideas work, but if they don't, fail quickly. don't fail slowly.

There is now a Mastodon instance for publishing scientists: FediScience.

Everyone is welcome from PhD student to professor, as well as researchers from outside of academia. You are welcome to stay afterwards, but it is also easy to change to another server.

There will be a lot of science talk on this server, but there is no need to only talk science

https://fediscience.org/invite/j6X8z7qF

Boosts are appreciated to let others know about this new instance.

The two ways academics demarcate their social rank:
a) the size of their shoulder pads (bigger is better)
b) the size of their email sigs