Category: Technical Labour

Yutu 2 on the Farside

Originally shared by Astronomy Picture of the Day (APoD)

Yutu 2 on the Farside

Image Credit: Chinese National Space Administration

https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap190105.html

On January 3, the Chinese Chang’e-4 spacecraft made the first successful landing on the Moon’s farside. Taken by a camera on board the lander, this image is from the landing site inside Von Karman crater. It shows the desksized, six-wheeled Yutu 2 (Jade Rabbit 2) rover as it rolled down lander ramps and across the surface near local sunrise and the start of the two week long lunar day. Ripe for exploration, Von Karman crater itself is 186 kilometers in diameter. It lies within the Moon’s old and deep South Pole-Aitken impact basin with some of the most ancient and least understood lunar terrains. To bridge communications from the normally hidden hemisphere of the Moon, China launched a relay satellite, Queqiao, in May of 2018 in to an orbit beyond the lunar farside.

Hard to give a fuck about Roy Moore, a total bag of shit but this story goes some way to explaining the kind of…

Hard to give a fuck about Roy Moore, a total bag of shit but this story goes some way to explaining the kind of world we now live in. Democracy is a battleground between various rich people trying to distort public perception via social media manipulation. Faking Russian bots is surely the next inevitable level of bullshit.

They also used thousands of Twitter accounts to make it appear as if automated Russian bot accounts were following and supporting Mr. Moore, according to an internal report on the project. The apparent Russian support for Mr. Moore drew broad news media coverage.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/26/us/reid-hoffman-alabama-election-disinformation.html

You can find me here https://mewe.com/i/johnhardy6 or on Twitter at @jhlagado

You can find me here https://mewe.com/i/johnhardy6 or on Twitter at @jhlagado

Originally shared by Andrea Riva

Went to MeWe, had a look around…

First impressions are good enough to raise some interest, though UI is a bit old-fashioned and UX is ruined by a general slowness.

There are pages (similar to G+ Pages), there are groups (Communities), there is chat, both one2one and group based.

Collections are replaced by hashtags, which appear to be a universal system to tag and categorize posted items (even those posted by other people).

But it doesn’t look like you can follow a person “by hashtag”, as you can do with Collections, so that if you don’t like his/her #flowers posts you just unsubscribe from those posts only. Maybe I’m wrong, however. Or maybe you can’t today, but they’ll add the feature tomorrow.

Relationships are symmetric: you can’t simply follow a person, you first ask him/her to get in contact; double consent is needed to become “friends”

There are some basic features to support collaboration in groups: a calendar, a collection of all shared documents, a collection of all shared videos and photos.

There are several privacy settings, which appear well laid out and easy to grasp. If they don’t make them too complicated, it’s quite easy to understand who can see what of your content.

After a quick tour, the beloved term “Ghost town” comes to mind, but wait! this is a startup which cannot force its app on a billion smartphones and cannot spam the web with invitations to join and cannot force users to have a MeWe login to post comments on YouTube, so talking about a sense of loneliness has a completely different meaning than it had with G+, and “Ghost town” should be replaced by “Small town”

(as a side note, I was taught to write short and concise sentences, but then I read Proust, and it all went havoc 🙂

Being own of the first members grants you a “no compromises” personal URL: as the first Andrea Riva in MeWe I’m the proud owner of https://mewe.com/i/andreariva (which can be changed, anyway)

For the time being it’s my go-to platform for the post-G+ era. Though I very rarely post anything, I would really miss some people who I met here, and since they are on MeWe, that’s a good enough reason to adopt it.