New paper thread! "Visibility of Satellites During the April 2024 Total Solar Eclipse" by me, @hannorein, and Aaron Boley. https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.19722
This paper started when we asked the question "Oh shit, are there so many bright Starlinks now that people will be able to see them during totality?!"
Later this week, this will be published in Research Notes of the American Astronomical Society, and hopefully an accompanying plain language article will be in the Conversation Canada.
Satellite Visibility During the April 2024 Total Eclipse
On 8 April 2024, tens of millions of people across North America will be able to view a total solar eclipse.arXiv.org
Ok, we are live: https://publicsectorai.tech/
The site lays out my position a little more clearly. For now, I have a reading list of the papers that really helped me shape my early thinking. Will be adding more resources as we go
#AI #CivicTech #GovTech #Government #publicsector
Public Sector AI
Welcome to Public Sector AI We are public sector employees who are curious about artificial intelligence, and concerned about ethics and...Public Sector AI
Andy H3 reshared this.
Ooh I've been planning on building a gov ai GitHub list for ages.
Also, some of these may be of interest!
AI execs who urgently need more energy to power their tech revolution are turning to fossil fuels
AI is driving a massive demand for electricity.
Despite earlier commitments, some executives now say clean energy may not meet AI's growing needs.
This was always going to be the case. Big Tech will never let the saving the environment get in the way of its insatiable greed.
There's a reason why the environmental collapse has run in parallel with the rise of Big Tech
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Hilarious #xkcd on metrics.
Don't miss the image description "I'm pleased to report we're now identifying and replacing hundreds of outdated metrics per hour." 😂
Andy H3 reshared this.
Using Google Scholar anonymously seems impossible nowadays.
If you don't sign into Google while deploying basic anti-tracking measures, you will be banished to a perpetual robo-captcha loop.
like this
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Mathematically, a first-past-the-post system will inevitably result in a two-party system (perhaps with the occasional success of a regional party).
There is nothing you can do within the system to change that - you can only vote for the party that better reflects your views (and pressure them to continue to do that).
The thing you do to dismantle two-party politics is advocating for other electoral models: proportional representation; single-transferrable vote or approval voting; etc.
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New research shows that LLMs are better at coming up with techniques to improve generative AI prompts than humans.
So it looks like AI is also going to steal the prompt engineering jobs as well. 😄
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A few months ago, I persuaded a client to abandon an external cloud system and use Nextcloud on their own server instead. Powered by FreeBSD and ZFS, it has already demonstrated its strengths on a couple of occasions (such as in the case of a snapshot rollback). This morning, they expressed the desire to abandon the various WhatsApp groups they use for coordination and to use a solution "all on their servers." I was inspired and quickly installed both an ejabberd and a Matrix server (Synapse) - which they will probably prefer, according to the latest news they sent me - on two FreeBSD jails.
Today, we have the awareness and experience of what it means to give our data to large companies, completely losing control over it. We have the tools, so why not use them?
And I'm really happy when someone like them, thanks to their willingness to try "new" solutions, realizes the alternatives to the colorful, advertised, warmly recommended (by salespeople) "proprietary" solutions.
#Jabber #XMPP #Matrix #Nextcloud #SelfHost #OSS #OwnYourData
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Signal Deb Packages -- Latest routine upgrade of #Signal from 6.48 to 7.0 (via their own package repro) seems to be rather experimental. 😲
Emojis and notification not working properly.
In a four-day trial, here’s how Russia sentenced leading human rights Oleg Orlov activist to 2.5 years in prison for writing that the Putin regime has become fascist — Meduza
Long-time human rights activist Oleg Orlov is going to prison for the next two and a half years, following a retrial that raised his punishment from a 150,000-ruble fine to incarceration.Meduza
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Introspection of the great spamegeddon of 2024 (last week).
As bad as it was... the Fediverse instance admins and mods really came together quick. Within a day the issue was contained. It's a testament that the fediverse can really work.
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Hello !Friendica Developers
I have been running #2024.03-rc for several days now. When I moved from stable to RC, the database and the update versions were correct once everything was done.
Today, I forwarded the RC by running git fetch & git pull
and now I got the following mismatch:
The database version is 1553/1554, the post update version is 1550/1550.
Running bin/console dbstructure update -f
doesn't seem to make a difference.
What's going on here? The database version doesn't normally change once the RC is branched off. How to correct it?
Students discover that vending machines on campus had a built in camera for facial recognition and profiling of students.
Instead of students coming up to a passive vending machine and making their own choice, the machine uses facial recognition to taylor the menu in order to boost sales.
— Because we all want a world were AI is leveraged to push more sugar to everyone.
https://futurism.com/the-byte/error-message-vending-maching-facial-recognition
Students Horrified When Error Message Appears on Vending Machine, Revealing Something Dark
The college students discovered that the facial recognition software was part of the vending machine's "demographic profiling" feature.Frank Landymore (Futurism)
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Businesses in the fediverse
I'm writing a blog post about businesses at the fediverse (although it might end up just as a sort-of directory.)
If you run a business with a fedi profile, and are happy for me to include it in my post, please link it below 😀
(If you run a business and use your own personal profile, that's cool too - link me happy!)
Tosbourn – Belfast based Ruby developers
Tosbourn are a Belfast based Ruby development team who care deeply about the web.Tosbourn Ltd
JabRef wants to develop an AI-powered module that can summarise academic papers via configurable online services. Hmm... but don't most papers already have a summary that we call "the abstract"?
The proposed indexing functionality via locally run LLMs seems interesting tough.
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Prof. Sam Lawler
in reply to Prof. Sam Lawler • • •We wrote a paper together a couple years ago with predictions for satellite visibility at night, and it was super depressing (I've talked a lot about that here).
Peer-reviewed article: https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/1538-3881/ac341b
Conversation article about it by me: https://theconversation.com/soon-1-out-of-every-15-points-of-light-in-the-sky-will-be-a-satellite-170427
Soon, 1 out of every 15 points of light in the sky will be a satellite
The ConversationProf. Sam Lawler
in reply to Prof. Sam Lawler • • •It's basically the same model, but now including the moon's shadow and adding Earthshine (yes, the same that lets you see the dark part of the crescent Moon)
The simulations show that Starlinks during the eclipse should be bright enough to be naked-eye visible in a fully dark sky. BUT, the sky is not fully dark during a total eclipse, it's a bit brighter than a full-moon sky. So, that bright sky will drown out the satellites.
Prof. Sam Lawler
in reply to Prof. Sam Lawler • • •Except, we didn't take "glints" into account. These are short, bright reflections from big, flat surfaces on satellites like solar panels, and they're getting much more common as we launch more junk into orbit. https://phys.org/news/2023-11-satellites-glints-hour-big-problem.html
If you've been looking up at a dark sky lately and though you saw a bright flash out of the corner of your eye, you're probably not imagining it. These are getting more and more common.
Satellites make up to 80,000 flashing glints per hour. It's a big problem for astronomers
Brian Koberlein (Phys.org)Prof. Sam Lawler
in reply to Prof. Sam Lawler • • •Starlink doesn't share any info on their exact satellite shape or orientation, so we can't make a precise prediction. (Wouldn't it be nice if they'd just share? But they don't, they consider all that to be proprietary info, and they're notorious for not even responding to journalist questions, let alone astronomers)
But we're pretty sure that some of these glints will be naked-eye visible during the eclipse.
Prof. Sam Lawler
in reply to Prof. Sam Lawler • • •So, if you are going to observe the total eclipse, please fully enjoy it!
But if you happen to notice a couple of bright flashes in the sky, let us know. Even better, if you have an all-sky camera that is running during the eclipse, we'd love to know if you see any satellites in those images!
This is our prediction to be tested next week: @hannorein has an all-sky camera ready to go, but it would be neat to know what happens in other parts of North America.
Prof. Sam Lawler
in reply to Prof. Sam Lawler • • •I'm glad that Starlink satellites are too faint to see as "moving stars" during the eclipse, and likely glints will not detract significantly from the event, if they are even visible.
But the fact that we even had to ask this question makes me deeply angry. What aspects of the sky will rampant commercialization of orbit destroy next? (I have some predictions, but they're all depressing...)
Conclusion: go enjoy your sky before corporations steal it from you!
https://eclipse2024.org/path-north-america.html
Alex@rtnVFRmedia Suffolk UK reshared this.
noplasticshower
in reply to Prof. Sam Lawler • • •Alex@rtnVFRmedia Suffolk UK
in reply to noplasticshower • • •Michael Busch
in reply to Alex@rtnVFRmedia Suffolk UK • • •Recent sociological work finds that the two most common things people claim as UFOs are Venus and Starlinks: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-023-49527-x .
One of many results of Elon Musk and those with him unilaterally making a mess of the sky.
(via @annaleen )
An environmental analysis of public UAP sightings and sky view potential - Scientific Reports
Naturevruz
in reply to Prof. Sam Lawler • • •Kitchen Priestess (She/Her)
in reply to Prof. Sam Lawler • • •plaws/VE[23]UWY/he-him🇨🇦🇺🇸
in reply to Prof. Sam Lawler • • •Take me out to the black,
Tell them I ain't comin back.
Burn the land and boil the sea,
You can't take the sky from me.
Um. Wait …
source: https://www.lyricsondemand.com/tvthemes/fireflylyrics.html
Firefly Lyrics - Theme Song Lyrics
Lyrics On DemandDiscovering BTS⁷ - 마리온
in reply to Prof. Sam Lawler • • •Prof. Sam Lawler
in reply to Prof. Sam Lawler • • •I've emailed many journalists about this paper, and the response has (almost) universally been "Wow, that's neat! But I'm about to travel to see the eclipse so I don't have time to write an extra article." Which is a heartwarming reason to get ignored! I am glad so many people are going to see this (and I hope they tell me if they see glints from satellites...)
Conversation article written by me and my coauthors coming soon! Maybe later today!
Lowlife's inane ramblings 🦜☠
in reply to Prof. Sam Lawler • • •Prof. Sam Lawler
in reply to Prof. Sam Lawler • • •Satellite Visibility During the 2024 April Total Eclipse - IOPscience
Aaron C. BoleyProf. Sam Lawler
in reply to Prof. Sam Lawler • • •Our article in The Conversation is now live! https://theconversation.com/as-the-skies-become-crowded-with-satellites-and-space-junk-will-it-affect-viewing-the-solar-eclipse-226616
"As the skies become crowded with satellites and space junk, will it affect viewing the solar eclipse?"
As the skies become crowded with satellites and space junk, will it affect viewing the solar eclipse?
The ConversationEye
in reply to Prof. Sam Lawler • • •Prof. Sam Lawler
in reply to Eye • • •Amata :verified_genderqueer:
in reply to Prof. Sam Lawler • • •Prof. Sam Lawler
in reply to Amata :verified_genderqueer: • • •Prof. Sam Lawler
in reply to Prof. Sam Lawler • • •Michael Porter
in reply to Prof. Sam Lawler • • •Ian Hecht
in reply to Prof. Sam Lawler • • •GhostOnTheHalfShell
in reply to Prof. Sam Lawler • • •AkaSci 🛰️
in reply to Prof. Sam Lawler • • •Shevek
in reply to Prof. Sam Lawler • • •llewelly
in reply to Prof. Sam Lawler • • •