@rodin

5 Followers
48 Following
33 Posts
I write software for airplanes and for fun and sometimes both.
Launched https://vahana.aero.
Reluctant occasional public speaker.
I make music, write fiction, and take my jeep or motorcycle on overland walks.
24 hours of Earth's rotation, with the camera locked to the sky instead of the ground. We're all hanging out on this spinning rock.
Brilliant video by Bartosz Wojczyński. https://artuniverse.eu/gallery/190705-rotation24h #nature #wonder #earth
Art Universe  •  Creative Astrophotography

This glorious visual history of SF as told through cover designs from @grahamsleight and Adam Roberts is SO CLOSE to funded via Unbound, and I suspect a ton of people here would like to own a copy.

Also: Graham is one of the great behind-the-scenes mensches of modern SFF and brings the exact opposite of the gee-whiz affect that would make so many versions of a project like this unbearable. It's going to be sharp as hell.

https://unbound.com/books/wonders-and-visions/

#ScienceFiction (I am TRYING with hashtags)

Wonders and Visions: A Visual History of Science Fiction

A sumptuous history of science fiction told through its iconic covers.

Unbound

I've been collecting interesting examples of information organisation in history, focusing on non-Western civilisations. I came across this example of an ancient Mesopotamian spreadsheet! It records wages paid to temple workers in 1295 BCE.

#History #AncientHistory #Cuneiform #Mesopotamia #CognitiveHistory

So, we talked to chatgpt in class today. It wrote an awful paper about my dissertation topic with fake references and no examples, just platitudes. I asked it to rate the number 13 on a scale of 1 to 10, and it wouldn't. I asked it to rate 6 on a scale of 1 to 10 and, so help me god, it rated 6 as a 7. It had a hard time justifying why 6 could be rated and 13 could not. It won't let you give Michelin stars to a scale from 1 to 10, but it rated a scale from 1 to 10 a 10 on a scale from 1 to 10.
Daniel Silva on Twitter

“From a friend of Gabriel Allon…”

Twitter
this kind of smart, walkable, mixed-use urbanism Is illegal to build in many american cities
Just look at it…

I built this tool a year ago but I feel like Mastodon folks would like it

The "Weird Old Book Finder"

Type in a search query, and it'll find one randomly-chosen public-domain book that matches the query -- and present it for immediate reading: https://www.weirdoldbookfinder.net/

Why only one book? To prevent the paradox of choice! Just *start readin'*

Can't promise every book will be weird, but most are

A longer essay on how/why I developed it: https://debugger.medium.com/a-search-engine-that-finds-you-weird-old-books-3a74fbb5f3d4

This was a search for "mastodon"

I've got trust issues. We all do. Some infosec pros go so far as to say #TrustNoOne, a philosophy more formally known as #ZeroTrust, that holds that certain elements of your security should *never* be delegated to *any* third party.

The problem is, it's trust all the way down. Say you maintain your own cryptographic keys on your own device. How do you know the software you use to store those keys is trustworthy? Well, maybe you audit the source-code and compile it yourself.

1/

I'm here. It's me. Magic!

The (green-ticked) Neil Gaiman