Charlie Loyd @vruba@everything.happens.horse

A bad thing about social media is this pattern where a person with expertise starts rebutting bad ideas, and it’s great, but over time it primes them to see everyone who doesn’t hold exactly their opinions as part of a horde of goons with terrible ideas, because that’s who they end up interacting with.

Eventually their online persona is, like, Truth Gladiator. And that’s so much less interesting and important to me than Thoughtful Person With Useful Perspectives.

As a Blind person i never thought i would be on social media savoring photos. But the communal Mastodon alt text game is so strong that sweet, poetic or silly descriptions abound on my timeline. Thanks to legions of people who take time to write a meaningful description of the ephemera they post, i learn so much about insects, plants, buildings, memes — all dispatches from a dimension of the world that i otherwise wouldn't experience. If you're wondering whether anybody reads these things: YES.

Nancy By Ernie Bushmiller August 1,1964

Today, we salute Thomé de Gamond, early Channel Tunnel proponent, who had to figure out the geology of the seabed first. https://m.gutenberg.org/files/66685/66685-h/66685-h.htm

etymologically, the opposite of “analemma” is “cathedral”

The #ParkFire event is, once again, re-writing the record books and "filling in the gaps" between recent extremely large wildfire footprints. This is California in the Pyrocene, and a couple of mild fire years (2022/3) don't alter that long-term trajectory. #CAwx #CAfire [2/2]

I feel like the one of the lowest level human internet problems we haven’t solved is how to be around millions of people, many of whom vocally disapprove of at least some of our thoughts and actions, without letting our hyper-social status-sensitive primate brains either melt or devote themselves to arguing that all our positions are the right positions for everyone.

Like yes, some algos are bad, but we also just built structures we can’t quite handle and are perma-mad at each other about it.

When I scheduled this live session yesterday to discuss Western North American wildfire situation, neither catastrophic fire in Canadian Rockies town of #Jasper nor dangerous #ParkFire in California had yet occurred. I will discuss both today @ 3pm PT. https://www.youtube.com/live/B5wskkRpadg

I am hilariously bad at going on vacation, but I was on the west coast and so I went to Cabo Pulmo, in Baja California Sur, to go scuba diving in the marine reserve. It’s kind of an incredible place — in 1995, the village (pop. 100 then, 150 now) worked together to get it declared a protected area. It’s now a UNESCO site and an absolutely thriving ecosystem, with careful ongoing oversight.

https://ocean.si.edu/conservation/solutions-success-stories/cabo-pulmo-protected-area

#PPOD: NASA's Curiosity rover ran over a rock and found crystals inside! They're pure sulfur. Elemental sulfur is something we’ve never seen before on Mars. We don't know much about these yellow crystals yet, but the team is already at work to figure it out! Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

#mars #space #science #scicomm

Draft Emoji 16.0 Design: Face with Bags Under Eyes #WorldEmojiDay https://emojipedia.org/face-with-bags-under-eyes

So, I can not stress this enough:

Shut the fuck up. I mean this with kindness. Shut the fuck up. It is not a good time to run your mouth on public coms. This should be obvious if you think about what just happened for 30 seconds, but again, with all due care and respect:

Shut the fuck up.

Persistently shocked by how much of adult life is dealing with the consequences of other adults determinedly (and obviously!) playing pretend, with terrible consequences.

https://lattice.com/blog/leading-the-way-in-responsible-ai-employment

If you've ever wondered how math fonts are made, the Noto project commissioned this amazing article from @khaled to explain all: https://github.com/notofonts/math/blob/main/documentation/building-math-fonts/index.md

Okay, folks. I’ve been asked by a lot of friends who aren’t following the AI discourse to sort of clarify what the main camps are arguing, how they approach the issues, etc. As a trusted observer, I’m happy to provide this orienting service. No questions or comments, please. Hope it helps!