Science/Techno Babble Random, Random

[dryrunguy]

Some time ago we discussed a potential exodus of scientists from USA. The link below is a press release by EPFL (one of the two Swiss federal institutes of technology) about appointment of new professors and promotion of existing ones. In the new appointments section every single one is relocating from US (some with previous Swiss connections). There have always been some, but not like this...

https://actu.epfl.ch/news/appointment-o ... ssors-171/

And we deserve every damn bit of it.

[Owendonovan]

Who didn't see this coming? It's like half of the intellectuals just went into the NCAA transfer portal.

[ti-amie]

Gil Durán‬
‪@gilduran.com‬
· 1d
This week: The Network State conference in Singapore.

Watch as radicalized tech billionaires and authoritarian governments openly plot a post-democracy, post-USA crypto future.

The Network State is an extremist tech cult based on the work of Curtis Yarvin. It calls for a program of "tech zionism."



To understand the Network State cult, read this piece I wrote about Balaji Srinivasan's terrifying fascist fever dreams for the future. Balaji's ideas are ignorant, paranoid & bizarre—and he's deeply influential in tech/crypto circles where he's regarded as a genius.

newrepublic.com/article/1804...

I should also note that Balaji is extremely wealthy but has been reported to subsist on a diet of Tate's Bake Shop cookies crumbled into a bowl of half-and-half.
And he says California is not a democracy but lives in Singapore, which has one-party rule and strict limits on speech.

By the way, it is usually live-streamed on YouTube.

[Owendonovan]

"Genius"
Mmhmm.

[Suliso]

Nobel prizes will be announced this week. Disregarding Peace there are lots of ideas by various people who might, but >50% of the time it's a bit of a surprise.

There is a lot of talk about folks who came up with the GLP-1 receptor agonists as anti obesity treatment. That would not be a surprise, same with quantum computing in physics.

[ti-amie]

How, in this day and age, is this possible?

Gergely Orosz
‪@gergely.pragmaticengineer.com‬
Didn’t think we’d see incompetence at this scale.

The backup of the on-prem data center for the Korean government was in the same location as the primary one.

Any basically qualified tech professional knows that this is no resilient backup: and now all data is lost…


If they would have hired any external consultant, they would have gotten the advice to have the backup in a different location than the primary. Plus, to have offline backups.

A backup on AWS, Azure, GCP, Oracle or any cloud would have avoided this…

koreajoongangdaily.joins.com/news/2025-10...

[Suliso]

2025 Nobel prize in medicine goes to Mary E. Brunkow, Fred Ramsdell and Shimon Sakaguchi or their discoveries concerning peripheral immune tolerance.

https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/medic ... s-release/

Again a little bit of a surprise. Physics is tomorrow and Chemistry the day after.

[Suliso]

The last flight of SpaceX Starship version 2.0 was a full success as explained below by Scott Manley. Now onwards to version 3.0 early next year.

[ponchi101]

What can be made of this?
Janelle Monáe says she time-traveled to the 1970s to see David Bowie in concert: 'I was backstage'

She was born in 1985.
So, the options are:
She time travelled to 1970.
She is as crazy as a person can be.
She is playing and making some noise, which is good publicity.

[ti-amie]

What can be made of this?
Janelle Monáe says she time-traveled to the 1970s to see David Bowie in concert: 'I was backstage'

She was born in 1985.
So, the options are:
She time travelled to 1970.
She is as crazy as a person can be.
She is playing and making some noise, which is good publicity.

Or she's been watching too many short form C-drama's where people time travel all the time.

[ti-amie]

From his Wiki:

Roy Lee Clay Sr. (August 22, 1929 – September 22, 2024) was an African American computer scientist and inventor. He was a founding member of the computer division at Hewlett-Packard, where he led the team that created the HP 2116A 16-bit minicomputer. He served as Chief Executive Officer of ROD-L Electronics, an electrical-safety test equipment manufacturer.

Clay was born on August 22, 1929, in Kinloch, Missouri.[2][3][4] At the time, Kinloch was the oldest African-American community that was incorporated in Missouri.[3]

Clay attended Douglass High School, a segregated school, and eventually was awarded a scholarship to study mathematics at Saint Louis University (SLU).[2][7] While at SLU, Clay wanted to become a baseball player.[7] He was one of the first African-Americans to graduate from SLU, earning a bachelor's degree in math in 1951.[5]

After struggling to find work in technology, Clay started work as a school teacher.[8] At an interview for McDonnell Aircraft Corporation, Clay was taken aside and told "Mr. Clay, I'm very sorry, we don't hire professional Negroes".[7] He taught himself to write software, and by 1958 was a programmer at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL).[2] Clay's early professional work involved creating a radiation tracking system to study the aftermath of a nuclear explosion.[5] While working at LLNL, Clay was introduced to David Packard, who encouraged Clay to apply for a job.[9]

After leaving LLNL, Clay worked at Control Data Corporation, where he created new Fortran compilers.[5][10] In 1962, Clay moved to Palo Alto, California.[7] Clay joined Hewlett-Packard (HP), where he helped to launch and lead the Computer Science division in 1965.[11][12] He was director of the team who developed the HP 2116A, one of the company's first minicomputers. Clay stayed at HP into the 1970s, eventually rising to being the highest-ranking African-American member of staff.[2] While working at HP, Clay developed several initiatives to improve the representation of African-Americans in Silicon Valley, including hiring from HBCUs.[13] He recognized the need to test electrical products for safety, and left HP in 1971 to start his own business.[11]

In 1977, Clay was the founder of ROD-L Electronics in Menlo Park, California, a "hipot and electrical-safety test equipment manufacturer."[8] ROD-L was the first producer of electrical safety test equipment to be certified by the UL.[14] An early proponent of flex time, he allowed employees to set their own schedule outside of core hours, stating, "I decided that the hours of greatest communication were between 10 am and 2 pm. Therefore, I asked that everyone be in the office between those hours, to avoid having trouble with scheduling meetings."[15]

In 2002, Clay was elected by the African American Museum and Library at Oakland as one of the most important African-Americans working in technology.[11] San Mateo County awarded ROD-L Electronics the Dads Count Family Friendly Employer Award, and Clay was inducted into the Silicon Valley Hall of Fame in 2003.[16] In 2021, the city of St. Louis opened the Roy Clay Sr. Computer Lab in his honor.[17]


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roy_Clay

[ti-amie]

Perry Areolar‬
‪@perryodontal.bsky.social‬
· 6h
the password to the louvre surveillance server was "louvre"

www.thesocialpost.it/2025/11/02/f...

The most famous museum in the world ends up in the eye of the cyclone not only for the theft of Napoleon's jewelry with an estimated value of 88 million euros, but also for the serious flaws in computer security systems.
According to what was revealed by the newspaper Libération, documents dating back to a 2014 inspection of the National Agency for the Security of French Computer Systems would have reported a disconcerting detail: the password of the Louvre video surveillance server was simply "Louvre".

‪Kevin Beaumont‬
‪@doublepulsar.com‬
· 1h
Average company PR department rewriting this if it was cyber incident

Louvre heist carried out sophisticated nation state attackers. We take your security very seriously and are installing advanced locks. There is no evidence anything was taken at this time.



‪KizuKatana‬
‪@kizukatana.bsky.social‬
· 2h
I...

The password on my fanfiction account is more secure than this.

I mean, do we actually know how much art in the Louvre is real anymore at this point, given that they basically left the key under the doormat for however many years?