Matt Panhans @mpanhans@librem.one

I wrote about the surprising pragmatism of Lina Khan’s Amazon antitrust lawsuit — and how it gives up on a lot of the more radical ideas in her famous law review paper. Maybe Amazon isn’t an antitrust paradox after all… https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/09/27/lina-khan-amazon-antitrust-paradox/

Oh my goodness I've just learned a thing about The Matrix that causes it to make a lot more sense: In the original script the humans were used as neural network compute clusters by the Machines and as a crucial component of The Matrix itself.

Which is why humans who were aware of the simulation could control aspects of The Matrix - their minds were part of its foundation.

Unfortunately the test audiences had trouble understanding this concept so the studio changed the human role to "batteries".

Case studies are always fun. The most impressive #PositConf2023 one was the city of #Chicago showing how they took 50k+ lines of rules-based SPSS code and reduced it to about 20 lines of tidymodels ML code to fix a scandalously broken property tax regime. And the whole thing is public!

Wild flamingos flock to #Wisconsin. https://www.jsonline.com/story/sports/outdoors/2023/09/22/flamingo-mania-draws-crowd-to-port-washington-beach/70932653007/

Flamingoes arrive at Lake Michigan in #Wisconsin - a totally normal and not at all weird thing.

#climate

https://milwaukeerecord.com/city-life/flamingos-in-wisconsin/

If you're interested in newer workflows for #rstats 📦 development, the 2nd edition of the R Packages book - free to read online! - includes a new chapter "The Whole Game" by @jennybryan that goes over a complete process when developing "a small toy package."
https://r-pkgs.org/whole-game.html
#PositConf2023 @rstats

This is awesome! Full text search has come to Mastodon, and it's being rolled out in a responsible way.

I know full text search is a hot-button issue. For journalists, researchers and many others, FTS is essential. Plenty of others have good reason to keep their content unsearchable.

If you're in the latter category, you don't need to take any action. Your toots will remain unsearchable just as they were before.

For the rest, please manually change the default so your toots will be searchable. This will address a major shortcoming that has kept a huge number of fedi holdouts from joining.

To do that, go to Preferences > Public Profile and select the Privacy and Reach tab. Then check the Include profile page in search engines box.

Fediverse: My first account on Mastodon was made shortly after the service was launched. I didn't heavily use it, but I loved the idea of the fediverse and what it could offer. I loved Twitter in the 2014-2020 times. I learned so much and discovered so many new things, and it helped me make connections I wouldn't have otherwise. I'm starting to feel that energy again with the growing instances and people I can follow.

On this day in 1985, a US Senate hearing began on the topic of obscene music. The Parents Music Resource Center (PMRC) were front and centre of this hearing, and we're going to briefly explore their "Filthy Fifteen" - the songs they found most morally objectionable.

Songs on the Filthy Fifteen list contained lyrics which were violent, sexual, referencing drug or alcohol use, or the occult.

And some of them were certified bops.

The first result in the iPhone App when you search for “mastodon” is the Threads app

If you're here on Mastodon you're probably not on Twitter (X).

So we'll fill you in on the platform's latest: It's making users wait 60x longer for major competitors' pages to load than the average wait for other sites.

NEW:
https://themarkup.org/investigations/2023/09/15/twitter-is-still-throttling-competitors-links-check-for-yourself

NEW: @matthewstoller, Director of Research at the American Economic Liberties Project, lays out the case for the new draft Merger Guidelines, arguing that they incorporate new lessons regarding technology and business practices while also learning from past mistakes.

https://www.promarket.org/2023/09/12/merger-guidelines-taking-on-a-monopoly-crisis/

Alex Trebek hosted his first episode of JEOPARDY on this day in 1984.

#academia #professorlife #academicchatter #academicmastodon

My department is hiring and it’s a great opportunity for economic historians!

The ideal candidate will do research and teach in the following fields:
- Economic History
- Macroeconomics
- and/or International Trade
Link to the job and more details: https://jobs.weber.edu/postings/20786

JOE posting coming soon.

Do not hesitate to ask any questions you night have. It’s a great department to work at.

The latest monthly updates post is here! Read ahead to find out which bugs were squashed, which new features landed, and what’s just around the corner 👀 https://blog.elementary.io/updates-for-august-2023/

econtwitter.net is winding down. 😢 Thanks for everything @paulgp

What instance should I migrate to? Hit me with your best highly charged internet opinions about a matter of fundamentally low stakes!

Techbros: self driving cars are inevitable!

Also techbros: prove you are human by performing a task that computers can’t do, like identifying traffic lights.

The Italian Jesuit mathematician, Giovanno Girolamo Saccheri, who discovered non-Euclidian geometry and didn't realise it, was born was 5 September 1667
#HistoryOfMathematics #histSTM
https://thonyc.wordpress.com/2013/09/05/the-problem-with-parallels/

Voyager 1 discovered three new moons (Prometheus, Pandora, and Atlas) shepherding Saturn's A- and F-rings.

It also uncovered a wealth of new information about basic properties of Saturn's moon Titan, from size to atmospheric composition.

Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech