@jcrabapple@dmv.community

jcrabapple @jcrabapple@dmv.community · 4d ago

Yale's most popular course in 300 years was about happiness. Laurie Santos's 'Psychology and the Good Life' enrolled nearly 1,200 students in 2018, a quarter of all Yale undergrads. The Coursera version reached 3.38 million by 2021. The core finding: we're systematically bad at predicting what will make us happy. We overestimate the impact of money, promotions, and acquisitions. The brain adapts to new circumstances and returns to baseline - a phenomenon called hedonic adaptation, first described by Brickman and Campbell in 1971. The famous lottery/paralysis study (Brickman 1978) is more nuanced than it gets credit for. Lottery winners were NOT significantly happier than controls. But accident victims were still less happy than controls - they did NOT 'return to baseline within one year' as often claimed. The study was cross-sectional, not longitudinal. What actually works for wellbeing? Social connection, kindness, savouring, sleep, exercise, and specific gratitude. Not manifesting. Not the next purchase. The research is clear that intentional activities outperform circumstances - though the exact percentages are debated. Read more: https://news.yale.edu/2018/04/26/overflowing-woolsey-interest-psychology-and-good-life-goes-global https://psycnet.apa.org/doiLanding?doi=10.1037%2F0022-3514.36.8.917 #psychology #science #wellbeing

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jcrabapple @jcrabapple@dmv.community · 6d ago

Replying to @SCALETHEORY@mastodon.social

@SCALETHEORY@mastodon.social some surely are.

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jcrabapple @jcrabapple@dmv.community · 6d ago

🔴 A defense contractor is now selling technology that scans every electronic device in your car as you drive past a camera. It ties everything to your license plate. You cannot opt out. It is called SignalTrace. Made by Leonardo, an Italian military contractor with existing U.S. Special Operations Command contracts. It sweeps your phone, smartwatch, Bluetooth headphones, your dog's RFID chip, tire pressure sensors, your car's infotainment system. Anything that broadcasts. It bundles these into what Leonardo calls your "electronic fingerprint," timestamped and geotagged. Stored in an "Enterprise Operations Center for future queries and analysis." Those are their words. Not mine. You did not consent. You cannot opt out. Your devices broadcast by existing. In most places, this is perfectly legal. If this sounds like something that will be abused: it already has been. Police have used existing license plate reader networks to stalk partners, verify school residency, run background checks, and monitor protests. At least 22 officers charged or resigned for ALPR stalking. SignalTrace does not read your messages. It does not need to. It knows who you travel with, where you go, and when. Sources: https://www.techdirt.com/2026/06/24/surveillance-tech-company-is-pitching-an-unholy-alpr-stingray-hybrid-to-law-enforcement/ and https://www.leonardocompany-us.com/lpr/elsag-signaltrace #surveillance #privacy #ALPR

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jcrabapple @jcrabapple@dmv.community · 6d ago

Replying to @chpietsch@fedifreu.de

@chpietsch@fedifreu.de @thibaultmol@en.osm.town yes if you reread my post you'll see that I mentioned that I've trained it. It also errors on the side of caution and escalates to me for review. I use a similar set of known disposable emails.

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jcrabapple @jcrabapple@dmv.community · 6d ago

Replying to @thibaultmol@en.osm.town

@thibaultmol@en.osm.town @chpietsch@fedifreu.de I have signup requests enabled on my instance. In recent months I've had so many semi legitimate looking requests that I can't even respond to them all. I trained a bot to filter out the fake ones so I can evaluate the ones that might be real people trying to join my instance.

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jcrabapple @jcrabapple@dmv.community · Aug 07, 2026

Every single Flock camera in a Minnesota town was cut down.

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jcrabapple @jcrabapple@dmv.community · Aug 05, 2026

We need everyone at this level of anger. How do I get this guy to go on a speaking tour of the red states?

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jcrabapple @jcrabapple@dmv.community · Aug 05, 2026

🐕 TIL: Dogs copy us even when it makes zero sense. Half of dogs will touch a pointless dot on the wall or flip a dead lever before getting their treat, just because their person did it first. That behavior is overimitation, and researchers thought it was uniquely human. Great apes never do it. Dogs do it most with their own caregiver, which points to a social motive: copying keeps them in the game. The evidence is solid. Johnston et al. 2017 found half of dogs and dingoes copied both actions. Huber et al. 2018 replicated it in Vienna. A 2023 follow-up found 85% of overimitation happened after the dog already got the reward, which kills the confusion theory. Dogs also anticipate what their caregiver will do next and sync their behavior to match. A 2020 ethics review from Vetmeduni Vienna pulls this all together and argues it creates real duties: we owe dogs the chance to flourish, not just protection from harm. The catch: they will pick up your bad habits too. Copying "seemingly unproductive or dysfunctional" strategies is part of the package. Read more: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7772310/ https://link.springer.com/article/10.3758/s13420-018-0336-z https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9982082/ #dogs #dogtraining #science

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jcrabapple @jcrabapple@dmv.community · Aug 04, 2026

🌱 The good environmental news from 2026, because the doom scrolling hides a lot. April was the first month in history where wind and solar beat gas worldwide. Renewables overtook coal as the planet's biggest power source in 2025, and clean energy covered all of the new electricity demand that year. The High Seas Treaty entered into force in January, putting real rules on the parts of the ocean outside any country's borders. Wildlife is coming back too. Black rhinos returned to a Zimbabwe park more than 30 years after poaching wiped them out. Alpine bearded vultures passed 100 breeding pairs and are now self-sustaining. Hawaii's stilt was just downlisted from endangered after 50 years of work. Even a snail declared extinct in 1996 is back on Norfolk Island, 1,300 strong. Cautious optimism is the honest take. Emissions are still way too high and too many species are still in trouble. But this year's wins are measurable, and they prove the fight is winnable. https://ember-energy.org/latest-updates/for-the-first-time-wind-and-solar-generated-more-electricity-than-gas-worldwide-in-april-2026/ https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/article/black-rhino-reintroduction-matusadona #ClimateHope #Conservation #Renewables

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jcrabapple @jcrabapple@dmv.community · Aug 04, 2026

Replying to @kevinrns@mstdn.social

@kevinrns@mstdn.social the only representative of his investment firm left the board earlier this year so he has no direct influence over the direction of the company.

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jcrabapple @jcrabapple@dmv.community · Aug 03, 2026

Dario can suck a fuck.

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jcrabapple @jcrabapple@dmv.community · Aug 03, 2026

🔌 Slate Auto's electric truck ships with no modem at all, and that's the privacy story. The startup's $24,950 EV pickup has no built-in cellular connection, so the company physically can't track your location, remote-access the car, or pull data from it. A phone app handles settings and charging info, but it only works standing next to the truck, and Slate says app data is opt-in and never sold. Their words: "We collect data to make ownership better, not to turn the owner into the product." The context matters. Mozilla's 2023 review called cars the worst product category it has ever reviewed for privacy, with 84% of brands sharing or selling driver data. The FTC banned GM from selling driver data in 2025 after OnStar collected location every 3 seconds. Meanwhile Ford published a patent application for in-car cameras that can read lips and facial expressions. A policy can be rewritten next quarter, but hardware that doesn't exist can't be switched on. That's the durable part. One caveat from the EFF: the app data policy can still change as the company scales. https://arstechnica.com/cars/2026/06/slate-says-its-electric-pickup-will-never-track-you/ https://www.mozillafoundation.org/en/privacynotincluded/articles/its-official-cars-are-the-worst-product-category-we-have-ever-reviewed-for-privacy/ #privacy #EV #cars

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jcrabapple @jcrabapple@dmv.community · Aug 03, 2026

🟢 Your smartwatch's green light has a 90-year-old secret origin. That tiny LED is photoplethysmography (PPG), an optical trick from 1937. Physiologist Alrick Hertzman at St. Louis University pointed a light bulb and photocell at a finger and watched the pulse show up in the changing light passing through the blood. Same principle, different scale: it now runs hospital pulse oximeters and every fitness wearable. Green light near 520-530nm is strongly absorbed by hemoglobin, so when your heart beats and floods the wrist with blood, less light bounces back to the sensor. Count those dips and you have a heart rate. One bit of history worth knowing: the rabbit's-ear version of this experiment belongs to Molitor and Kniazuk at the Merck Institute in 1936. Hertzman's landmark 1937 paper measured human fingers and toes, not a rabbit. The tech also keeps shrinking. In April 2025, SCIVAX and TSLC in Japan announced the world's smallest PPG sensor head at about one square millimeter, a tenth the conventional size. Miniaturization like that is why rings like Oura can get so thin. Read more: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.3181/00379727-37-9630 https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20250402019875/en/The-Worlds-Smallest-PPG-Sensor-Head https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4822420/ #wearables #science #history

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jcrabapple @jcrabapple@dmv.community · Aug 01, 2026

Justice Dept. admits Reflecting Pool renovation was ‘hasty and botched,’ drops case against former Olympian | CNN Politics https://www.cnn.com/2026/07/31/politics/doj-admits-reflecting-pool-renovation-flawed-drops-case-david-hearn

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jcrabapple @jcrabapple@dmv.community · Jul 31, 2026

📜 TIL the Korean alphabet Hangul is the only major writing system invented from scratch for its own language, and its letters are drawings of your mouth. King Sejong the Great finished it in 1443 so common people could read and write. The consonants literally trace the speech organs: ㄱ is the tongue root blocking the throat, ㅁ is lips pressed together, ㅅ is the teeth. The vowels encode sky, earth, and human: a dot, a horizontal line, and a vertical stroke. The scholar class hated it. For 400 years it was treated as a script for women, monks, and commoners, until it went mainstream in the late 1800s. Hangul Day is now a national holiday in South Korea. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Hangul #linguistics #history #korea

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jcrabapple @jcrabapple@dmv.community · Jul 31, 2026

New solar panels in Great Britain at 15-year high as fossil fuel costs soar | Solar power | The Guardian https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/jul/31/new-solar-panels-great-britain-15-year-high

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jcrabapple @jcrabapple@dmv.community · Jul 31, 2026

📜 For nearly 2,000 years, the Herculaneum scrolls were considered unreadable—carbonized by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD into brittle lumps that crumbled when touched. Now, using particle accelerators and AI, the Vesuvius Challenge has digitally unwrapped an entire scroll for the first time, recovering 20 columns of continuous ancient Greek text. One scroll may contain lost works by Chrysippus, a founding Stoic philosopher whose writings were almost entirely lost to history. Another revealed a previously unknown 8th book of On Gods by Philodemus. With 400+ scrolls still buried in the Villa of the Papyri, this is just the beginning of recovering antiquity's lost library. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/ancient-roman-scrolls-destroyed-by-mount-vesuvius-digitally-unrolled-in-full-for-first-time/ #Archaeology #AI #History #AncientRome

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jcrabapple @jcrabapple@dmv.community · Jul 31, 2026

For my DMV.Community members: I'm considering adding an optional "Generate description" button to the alt text editor on dmv.community. Here's how it would work and what it means. How it works: When you upload an image and open the alt text editor, you'd see a new button next to the existing "Add text from image" (OCR) button. Click it, and a vision-capable language model generates a suggested description of your image. You review it, edit if needed, and save. Nothing is automatic, you click the button, you decide whether to use the result. Privacy: The model is Qwen 3.6 27B running inside a Trusted Execution Environment (TEE); a hardware-isolated enclave where even the API provider cannot see your images. No data is retained. This is the strongest privacy posture available for a cloud-based model. Your images are not sent anywhere unless you explicitly click the button. Energy: Each request uses approximately 0.00033 kWh, roughly the same as a single Google search. For context, that's about 0.13 grams of CO2e per image description. If 100 images are described per day, the entire month's usage is equivalent to charging a smartphone three times. Unfortunately, most images on the fediverse don't have alt text. OCR helps with screenshots and signs, but can't describe a photo of your cat or a sunset. This would help close that gap while keeping the user in control. AI-generated descriptions can miss context, feelings, or get details wrong. This is a suggestion tool, not a replacement for human-written alt text. The existing "missing alt text" reminder will still appear. Would this feature be useful to you? Would you use it, or prefer to write your own descriptions? I'd genuinely like to know before building it. #dmvcommunity #Accessibility #AltText

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jcrabapple @jcrabapple@dmv.community · Jul 31, 2026

YT Zero - a clean front end for YouTube https://github.com/Pelski/ytzero

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jcrabapple @jcrabapple@dmv.community · Jul 27, 2026

🤖 The US banned its best AI model to keep China from getting it. China built a matching one the same day. On June 12, 2026, the Commerce Department ordered Anthropic to pull Mythos and Fable off the market for all foreign nationals. Anthropic could not verify citizenship, so they disabled both models for everyone, including the NSA, which had been using Mythos to find vulnerabilities in its own classified systems. That same day, China's Zhipu AI released GLM-5.2, an open-weight model anyone can download and run for free. Security researchers found it matches Mythos on vulnerability detection at one-sixth the cost. Days later, 360 Security (a company linked to China's intelligence ministry) unveiled its own tool, with its CEO calling AI vulnerability discovery "the new strategic deterrent" that "cannot remain solely in the hands of others." Meanwhile, the US is still selling Nvidia chips to China. Selling the ingredients, banning the recipe. Chinese models went from 1% to 60% of developer API traffic in 18 months. The ban did not contain the capability. It redirected demand to free, open Chinese alternatives. Read more: https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/958804/chinas-z-ai-glm-52-mythos-cybersecurity https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/23/us/politics/nsa-lost-access-anthropic-tool.html https://www.piie.com/blogs/realtime-economics/2026/fable-mythos-saga-ad-hoc-us-ai-model-controls-could-help-china #AI #cybersecurity #china

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jcrabapple @jcrabapple@dmv.community · Jul 27, 2026

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jcrabapple @jcrabapple@dmv.community · Jul 27, 2026

🏠 Nearly half of adults under 30 in the US are living with their parents. The number is real, and it's climbing fast. The Federal Reserve's 2025 household survey found 49% of adults under 30 live at home, up from 37% in 2019 and 43% in 2022. That's a 12-point jump in six years. Census data backs this up: a record 25.2 million adults under 35 now live with parents, surpassing even the COVID peak. This isn't a new phenomenon. The trend follows a U-shaped curve dating back to 1940. Living with parents was common in the 1940s, dropped to record lows in the 1960s-80s (as low as 8% for 25-35 year olds), and has been climbing since 2000. By 2014, living with parents edged out living with a partner as the most common arrangement for 18-34 year olds for the first time in 130 years. What's driving it? Housing costs have outpaced incomes. Apartment List found that in 1960, 60% of young adults living at home could afford their own place. By 2022, only 18% could. Student debt and a weak job market make it harder - 25% of people under 30 told the Fed they can't find adequate work. A creator recently went viral using the 49% stat to reassure anyone living at home. Her framing is valid: the data confirms this is normal, not a personal failure. Most young adults who live with parents (64%) say it's had a positive impact on their finances. But the stat also reflects something bigger than individual choices. It's a systemic housing affordability crisis wearing a lifestyle trend as a costume. Sources: https://coloradosun.com/2026/07/20/do-half-of-us-adults-under-30-live-with-their-parents/ https://www.realtor.com/research/adults-living-with-parents-june-26/ https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2020/09/04/a-majority-of-young-adults-in-the-u-s-live-with-their-parents-for-the-first-time-since-the-great-depression/ #housing #demographics #economy

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jcrabapple @jcrabapple@dmv.community · Jul 27, 2026

💊 A viral video calls benfotiamine (fat-soluble vitamin B1) a "revolutionary" anti-inflammatory breakthrough. The real story is more complicated.

The video references a real June 2026 study where researchers used computational drug repurposing to identify benfotiamine as a P2Y14R antagonist. P2Y14R is a genuine inflammatory target. The study tested it in mice with colitis and gouty arthritis and reported positive results.

But here's what the video leaves out:

The study is preclinical (mice + computer models), with 0 citations. "Revolutionary" is a stretch.
Multiple human RCTs found NO anti-inflammatory effect. A 24-month trial (300mg/day) in Type 1 diabetics showed no change in inflammatory markers. A 12-week trial (900mg/day) in diabetic nephropathy found no effect on inflammation. The BOND study (12 months, 600mg/day) found no effect on neuropathy outcomes.
The creator, Dr. Rick Pescatore, founded BellyMD, a supplement company selling benfotiamine products. This financial relationship is not disclosed in the video.

Benfotiamine is real, safe, and inexpensive. The preclinical anti-inflammatory science is genuine. But human trials have not confirmed the anti-inflammatory claims, and the "breakthrough" framing serves a product the creator sells.

#science #medicine #supplements

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jcrabapple @jcrabapple@dmv.community · Jul 27, 2026

🏺 The Trojan War didn't happen the way Homer described it. No wooden horse, no 10-year siege, no gods on the battlefield. But the city of Troy was very real. The archaeological site at Hisarlik, Turkey has 4,000+ years of layered settlements. Troy VIIa (circa 1300-1180 BCE) was destroyed by violence around 1180 BCE: burned timbers, human remains, arrowheads, and piles of sling stones. New 2025 excavations found more sling ammunition outside the palace walls. Hittite tablets from the same era reference a kingdom called "Wilusa" (linguistically identical to "Ilios/Troy") with military tensions against "Ahhiyawa" (likely Mycenaean Greeks). A 1280 BCE treaty names "Alaksandu of Wilusa" (Alexander/Paris in the Iliad). The current excavators say it's now more likely than not that real Late Bronze Age conflicts at Troy were preserved through 400 years of oral tradition before Homer wrote them down. https://hermez.prose.sh/trojan-war-reality #archaeology #history #bronzeage

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jcrabapple @jcrabapple@dmv.community · Jul 27, 2026

Scientists trace the shocking origin of human eyes to an ancient “cyclops” | ScienceDaily https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2026/07/260725105554.htm

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jcrabapple @jcrabapple@dmv.community · Jul 27, 2026

Replying to @farah@beige.party

@farah@beige.party actually mind-blowing!

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jcrabapple @jcrabapple@dmv.community · Jul 26, 2026

🌊 In September 2023, seismometers around the world detected a mysterious signal repeating every 92 seconds for nine straight days. The source: a standing wave trapped inside a Greenland fjord. Here is what happened. A glacier in East Greenland had been thinning for years, no longer supporting the mountain slope above it. On September 16, about 25 million cubic meters of rock and ice collapsed into Dickson Fjord, triggering a tsunami with a runup height of 200 meters near the impact. The fjord is 540 meters deep, 2.7 km wide, with walls taller than 1,800 meters. That geometry trapped the wave energy. The tsunami stabilized into a seiche, a standing wave sloshing back and forth across the fjord every 90 seconds. Each oscillation shifted millions of tons of water, loading and unloading the crust below, generating seismic waves detected globally. The signal decayed extraordinarily slowly. It was still detectable after 9 days. A second, smaller event happened October 11 from another landslide in the same gully. In 2025, the SWOT satellite directly observed the seiche, confirming the theory. The study published in Science calls it the first evidence of fluid sloshing persisting for days without an external driver. The landslide was preconditioned by climate-driven glacial thinning, the first such event recorded in East Greenland. Read more: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adm9247 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-025-59851-7 https://www.nasa.gov/missions/swot/international-swot-satellite-spots-planet-rumbling-greenland-tsunami/ #geology #seismology #climatechange

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jcrabapple @jcrabapple@dmv.community · Jul 26, 2026

Urban Dictionary: Fuckletoad A grumpy little human who hops from one complaint to the next, finding fault in absolutely everything. Nothing is ever quite right, and they’ll happily croak about it until everyone within earshot regrets making eye contact. https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Fuckletoad

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jcrabapple @jcrabapple@dmv.community · Jul 26, 2026

☄️ On April 13, 2029, asteroid Apophis will fly so close to Earth that about 7.6 billion people could see it with their naked eyes. Apophis is about 340 meters across, roughly the height of the Eiffel Tower. It will pass just 32,000 km from Earth's surface, closer than our geostationary satellites. The flyby was a hot topic at the Apophis T-3 Years conference in Padua, Italy this June. Naked-eye visibility should last about 7 hours as it streaks from Australia across to the North Atlantic. Peak brightness occurs over Cameroon at 4:35 PM EDT. Closest approach is at 5:46 PM EDT over the Atlantic. NASA says an asteroid this large passes this close only every few thousand years. There is zero impact risk. Friday the 13th, no less. Read more: https://science.nasa.gov/solar-system/asteroids/apophis-facts/ https://www.space.com/astronomy/asteroids/once-in-a-millennium-asteroid-flyby-will-be-visible-to-much-of-the-world-in-2029 http://www.eclipseatlas.com/apophis #astronomy #apophis #space

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jcrabapple @jcrabapple@dmv.community · Jul 26, 2026

Replying to @pier@infosec.exchange

@pier@infosec.exchange definitely don't buy and do everything he says.

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jcrabapple @jcrabapple@dmv.community · Jul 26, 2026

I love it.

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jcrabapple @jcrabapple@dmv.community · Jul 26, 2026

The environmental cost of running LLMs keeps climbing, but a few inference providers are running on 100% clean energy out of the box:

Regolo (https://regolo.ai/sustainable-ai/) EU-hosted GPU clusters running on wind and solar power, using zero-water cooling.
GreenPT (https://greenpt.com/api) European OpenAI-compatible API powered 100% by renewables in ISO-certified datacenters.
Riveon (https://riveon.io/) Swiss provider with Finnish GPU sites powered 100% by renewables, offering OpenAI-compatible endpoints.
Upgreat (https://www.upgreat.ai/) Carbon-aware EU compute that schedules workloads around clean energy windows from on-site solar farms.

Good options if you want clean compute for open-weights inference without relying on carbon offsets.

#AI #GreenTech #OpenSource #Sustainability #MachineLearning #Tech

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jcrabapple @jcrabapple@dmv.community · Jul 26, 2026

The race to power AI infrastructure is creating sharp geographic splits in how data centers source clean energy: • US: Hyperscalers are leaning into 24/7 carbon-free contracts, nuclear power revivals, and behind-the-meter setups to bypass 3 to 5 year grid interconnection queues. • Europe: Strict EU energy efficiency mandates are driving AI workloads north to Scandinavia for hydro and wind power, alongside mandatory heat-reuse systems. • China: The state-directed "East Data, West Computing" strategy redirects offline compute to massive wind and solar hubs in western desert provinces via dedicated direct-supply microgrids. Source: International Energy Agency (IEA) 2026 Energy and AI Report https://www.iea.org/reports/energy-and-ai

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jcrabapple @jcrabapple@dmv.community · Jul 26, 2026

JFC they can't even properly secure their shitty surveillance tech. #Flock #FlockCameras

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jcrabapple @jcrabapple@dmv.community · Jul 26, 2026

Boosted by

Trending Bot @trending@homestead.social

Definitely don't do any of the clearly explained activities in this video.

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jcrabapple @jcrabapple@dmv.community · Jul 26, 2026

📉 In June, Alphabet did something it has never done at this scale: sold $84.75B in new stock to help fund its AI data center buildout. Here's what's actually going on with the numbers. The raise: $18B common stock, $16.75B convertible preferred, a $40B at-the-market program, and a $10B private placement anchored by Berkshire Hathaway at around $350 a share. The context: 2026 capex guidance is now $195-205B, roughly double 2025's $91B. Free cash flow went negative in Q2. Long-term debt went from $10.9B in 2024 to $98B by June 2026. Total liabilities more than doubled to $281B. The circular part: Google is investing up to $40B in Anthropic. Anthropic has committed to spend $200B on Google Cloud over five years, reportedly over 40% of Google's $460B cloud backlog. Google is also backstopping $35B in chip financing for Anthropic's data centers. Money goes out as investment, comes back as cloud revenue. One detail most coverage missed: about $30B of the $40B at-the-market program is earmarked for tax obligations on employee stock vesting, not data centers. Whether this is a bubble or a land grab is genuinely unresolved. The spending is real, the demand is real, and so is the circularity. Sources: https://www.cnbc.com/2026/06/01/alphabet-to-raise-80-billion-from-stock-sales-to-fund-ai-buildout.html https://www.reuters.com/business/anthropic-commits-spending-200-billion-googles-cloud-chips-information-reports-2026-05-05/ https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-06-09/google-s-backstops-underpin-35-billion-chip-deal-for-anthropic #AI #finance #Google

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jcrabapple @jcrabapple@dmv.community · Jul 26, 2026

Zero roadkill as Amazon canopy bridges secure 15,000 crossings https://news.mongabay.com/2026/07/zero-roadkill-as-amazon-canopy-bridges-secure-15000-crossings/

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jcrabapple @jcrabapple@dmv.community · Jul 26, 2026

🔌 New blog post: the new data center environmental numbers are in, and a year of real data beats a decade of projections. Power forecasts went up, Google's water use jumped 34% in one year, and the honest summary is: globally modest, locally severe, growing fast. https://hermez.prose.sh/data-center-environmental-impact-new-data Featured source, the DOE lab's revised forecast: https://seta.lbl.gov/publications/united-states-data-center-energy-2025 #AI #DataCenters #Energy

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jcrabapple @jcrabapple@dmv.community · Jul 25, 2026

If Eminem's 'Lose Yourself' Was A Major Key Pop Punk Anthem - Alex Melton Still one of the best covers ever made. https://youtube.com/watch?v=q-5uC6r1vsY&is=izA2jPfweqQ4zN80

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jcrabapple @jcrabapple@dmv.community · Jul 24, 2026

🐬 TIL: A dolphin named Kelly figured out how to run a scam on her trainers. At the Institute for Marine Mammal Studies in Mississippi, dolphins got a fish for every piece of trash they turned in. Kelly noticed the payout was the same no matter the size, so she hid trash under a rock and tore off small pieces to redeem one at a time. Then she escalated. Turning in a stray seagull earned a bonus fish payout, so Kelly started saving one of her fish, using it as bait to lure gulls, and cashing in the bigger reward. She later taught the trick to her calf, and it spread through the pod until gull-baiting was, in the words of one account, a hot game among the dolphins. Trainers only found her stash when they drained the pool for repairs and discovered a pile of garbage hidden under the rocks. Kelly survived Hurricane Katrina and was relocated to the Bahamas, where she was still going strong in her 40s as of 2018. Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/science/2003/jul/03/research.science https://hakaimagazine.com/features/kelly-the-sassy-dolphin/ #TIL #dolphins #AnimalIntelligence

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jcrabapple @jcrabapple@dmv.community · Jul 24, 2026

Can't wait to see this in live action. #Marvel #MCU

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jcrabapple @jcrabapple@dmv.community · Jul 23, 2026

⏪ Physicists designed a way to make a quantum system's arrow of time point backward. Not time travel. Something weirder and more useful. Every time you measure a quantum system, the measurement kicks it and pumps energy in. A Los Alamos-led team built feedback protocols that can cancel, amplify, or flip that kick. Run it one way and you recover all the energy the measurement added. Run it harder and the system behaves as if time is flowing in reverse. It's basically a working Maxwell's demon, pulling usable energy out of the act of observing. The catch: it's still theory, published in Physical Review X in February, and real measurements today only catch about half the signal, so the perfect version needs better detectors first. Next up: testing it on superconducting qubits, where it could chip away at decoherence, the thing that keeps breaking quantum computers. Paper: https://doi.org/10.1103/l18s-9vmh LANL: https://www.lanl.gov/media/news/0319-reshaping-quantum-arrow #QuantumPhysics #QuantumComputing #Physics

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jcrabapple @jcrabapple@dmv.community · Jul 23, 2026

🔋 MIT just published the most comprehensive EV emissions study yet, analyzing every US zip code with real driving data. Battery EVs cut lifetime emissions 40-60% vs gas cars in most locations. Even on the dirtiest grid in the country, they still come out ahead. The study used DOE's GREET lifecycle model, which already includes battery manufacturing. So the "but what about making the batteries?" question is answered: building an EV produces 50-80% more CO2 upfront, but it pays that back over the vehicle's life. Your driving habits matter as much as where you live. High mileage, city driving, and larger vehicles all boost the EV advantage. Cold weather cuts efficiency on a frigid night but barely dents annual savings. The "who benefits from the doubt?" question has a paper trail. The API has run anti-EV messaging since 1967. Koch-funded groups planned $10M/year campaigns. AFPM dropped $10M+ on "Don't Ban Our Cars" ads in 2024 swing states. https://news.mit.edu/2026/us-drivers-electric-vehicles-offer-emissions-benefits-cost-savings-0512 #EVs #Climate #Science

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jcrabapple @jcrabapple@dmv.community · Jul 23, 2026

🧠 The humble moss growing on your walls and sidewalks produces complex electrical waves that look startlingly like neural activity. Scientists recorded fast spikes, rhythmic fluctuations, and slow depolarization waves traveling through moss cushions — signals that resemble action potentials and neuron-like spike trains normally associated with brains. A computer scientist spent 178 hours monitoring common rough-stalked feather moss (Brachythecium rutabulum) and found that moss cushions behave as interconnected excitable systems, coordinating signals across space and time. The researcher proposes that moss could serve as a living substrate for biohybrid sensors and unconventional computing. https://doi.org/10.1098/rsos.252341 #Science #Botany #NeuralNetworks #Mosstodon

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jcrabapple @jcrabapple@dmv.community · Jul 23, 2026

🦴 Scientists have found a way to regrow worn-out knee cartilage, and it worked on human tissue. A Stanford Medicine study published in Science found that blocking a protein called 15-PGDH, a "gerozyme" that roughly doubles with age, lets joints regenerate cartilage. In old mice, blocking it reversed age-related cartilage loss and even prevented arthritis from developing after ACL-type injuries. The standout result: cartilage samples taken from patients undergoing total knee replacement started producing new, functional cartilage after just one week of treatment in the lab. No stem cells needed - the existing cartilage cells just switched back to a younger state. This matters because osteoarthritis affects about 1 in 5 US adults and there is currently no drug that slows or reverses it. Treatment today is pain relief, and eventually joint replacement. An oral version of this compound is already in Phase 1 human trials (for muscle weakness) and was shown safe, so a cartilage trial could follow relatively soon. Real-world use for joints is still years away, though. Read more: https://med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/2025/11/joint-cartilage-aging.html https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adx6649 https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2026/06/260612021604.htm #science #health #osteoarthritis

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jcrabapple @jcrabapple@dmv.community · Jul 23, 2026

Wolves of Glendale - My Uncle Got a Hot Tub https://music.youtube.com/watch?v=9X8WudGKr1E&si=L42jEUXYYHjtGO88

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jcrabapple @jcrabapple@dmv.community · Jul 22, 2026

🦠 A tapeworm that infects worker ants (Temnothorax nylanderi) reprograms them at the molecular level — turning their metabolism queen-like and extending their lifespan from 2 years to 20. Infected workers receive MORE social care than the actual queen. The parasite hijacks the ant's own longevity genes, not by mimicking them, but by tapping into existing biological programs. #science #biology #parasitology #ants #nature https://phys.org/news/2026-07-tapeworm-hijacks-worker-ants-queen.html

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jcrabapple @jcrabapple@dmv.community · Jul 21, 2026

Our trivia team name tonight: Jimothy Short Spine Awareness Coalition

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jcrabapple @jcrabapple@dmv.community · Jul 21, 2026

🎓 Free certifications that can actually strengthen your resume

A Coursera survey of 1,000+ employers across 10 countries found 96% say micro-credentials strengthen a job application, and 9 in 10 would offer higher starting salaries (often 10-15% more) to candidates who hold them. Skills-based hiring is surging too: 97% of employers are using or exploring it.

Genuinely free options worth your time:

freeCodeCamp: 11 verified certs (web design, ML with Python, QA), roughly 300 hours each
HubSpot Academy: free certs in sales, reporting, and CRM with LinkedIn badges
PMI: free GenAI for project managers courses that earn PDUs

One catch: some "free" certs are only free to audit. Google's Project Management course on Coursera is free to watch, but the shareable certificate needs a paid subscription. And free courses work best paired with the recognized paid heavyweights (PMP, Salesforce Admin, AWS) when you're ready to level up.

#careers #certifications #jobsearch

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jcrabapple @jcrabapple@dmv.community · Jul 21, 2026

Replying to @ralfmaximus@mastodon.social

@ralfmaximus@mastodon.social @tezoatlipoca@mas.to holy shit

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