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submitted 4 days ago by artifex@piefed.social to c/space@beehaw.org

Supergiant Betelgeuse was recently discovered to have a companion star - it's bright blue, not yet fusing hydrogen, and actually orbiting so close that it's inside Betelgeuse's outer atmosphere! I wonder what it'll be named.

17

There are several old avocado trees on my corner, including the one that makes these small (tho not usually this small) green avocados that turn purple and shiny like an eggplant when fully ripe. The taste is pretty typical for a green avocado -- so much less fatty than a Haas -- but with a nice floral note that I haven't come across in other varieties.

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submitted 5 days ago by artifex@piefed.social to c/space@beehaw.org

When Reaction Engines went bankrupt a few years ago there was much speculation about when -- not if -- their technology for a supercooled hybrid ramjet/rocket engine would be picked up by another entity. It seems we now have our answer as the ESA hopes to revive and complete the ambitious project for a single-stage-to-orbit, air-breathing spaceplane.

[-] artifex@piefed.social 4 points 6 days ago

When this happens to me it’s usually a cloudflare problem. Sometimes it fixes itself in a day or two. A few times it has been broken for weeks and I’ve had to use a VPN to reach it.

[-] artifex@piefed.social 8 points 6 days ago

Mario? Is that-a you?

[-] artifex@piefed.social 6 points 6 days ago

As long as we haven’t already hit any of the important tipping points that cause runaway effects of their own, right? (Eg methane clathrates, minimum albedo, etc)

[-] artifex@piefed.social 6 points 1 week ago

Humans will almost certainly bring a solution. Might not be a good one for most people though.

[-] artifex@piefed.social 18 points 1 week ago

We can also be the solution.

There are more options than just capitalism (and especially the weird kind of klepto-capitalism that we're falling into globally now).

[-] artifex@piefed.social 1 points 1 week ago

Fun fact: the protein-digesting enzyme bromelain is found in pineapples. So in some sense, while you're eating the pineapple, the pineapple is eating you . Do with that what you will.

[-] artifex@piefed.social 1 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

I think the main one is that Nostr is supposed to be really simple, and derive some security/privacy from that simplicity. Whereas ATProto and ActivityPub store and forward content so that each rely has a copy, on Nostr nodes the messages are all ephemeral. So it has something of a following with crypto bros and privacy enthusiasts. With nostr IDs are also based on public/private keys unlike ATProto/ActivityPub that use a username@instancename scheme, so signing and identifying content that belongs to a user is easier and more guaranteed to be correct, and your username isn't tied to any specific server "instance"

[-] artifex@piefed.social 1 points 1 week ago

I kinda agree Twitter was born of a more innocent age, and he was just a tech kid with a good enough pitch to get Silicon Valley VC. The problem is that he did little to rein in powers that were purposely using the platform for social manipulation. Then -- when he already knew better -- he went and started Bluesky, which he specifically said was going to counteract all of Twitter's deficiencies, but capitalism got the better of him, so to make the platform attractive to VCs, advertisers, whatever, his team started to ditch what made Bluesky unique in favor of business tools to help it make money. Business is gonna business, it's not 100% his fault, but I can't imagine what will change a 3rd time around.

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Having fucked up social discourse with Twitter and then Bluesky, Jack Dorsey claims he has seen the error of his ways, and definitely won't do it a third time with his new nonprofit aimed at helping developers build and deploy (OSS or commercial) social media tech built on the Nostr platform (with AI!). Yeesh, I might be biased. Maybe I shouldn't be writing these summaries.

[-] artifex@piefed.social 2 points 1 week ago

words that mathematically fit following the prompts

if only we had a word for applying math to data to give the appearance of a complex process we don't really understand.

[-] artifex@piefed.social 4 points 1 week ago

Looking forward to another fun read!

artifex

joined 1 month ago