ptz

Good riddance.

Community colleges have been dealing with an unprecedented phenomenon: fake students bent on stealing financial aid funds. While it has caused chaos at many colleges, some Southwestern faculty feel their leaders haven’t done enough to curb the crisis.

Ever since the pandemic forced schools to go virtual, the number of online classes offered by community colleges has exploded. That has been a welcome development for many students who value the flexibility online classes offer. But it has also given rise to the incredibly invasive and uniquely modern phenomenon of bot students now besieging community college professors like Smith.

The bots’ goal is to bilk state and federal financial aid money by enrolling in classes, and remaining enrolled in them, long enough for aid disbursements to go out. They often accomplish this by submitting AI-generated work. And because community colleges accept all applicants, they’ve been almost exclusively impacted by the fraud.

Cross-posted from "A Federal Judge Is on the Brink of Criminally Prosecuting Trump Officials for Contempt" by @remington@beehaw.org in !politics@beehaw.org

In a thundering opinion on Wednesday, U.S. District Judge James Boasberg announced that he had found probable cause to hold the Trump administration in criminal contempt for defiance of his orders. It is “obvious,” Boasberg wrote, that government officials “deliberately flouted” his commands by deporting Venezuelan migrants to a Salvadoran prison on March 15 under President Donald Trump’s invocation of the Alien Enemies Act of 1798. And now they must answer for their unlawful conduct. “The Constitution,” he declared, “does not tolerate willful disobedience of judicial orders—especially by officials of a coordinate branch who have sworn an oath to uphold it.”

I get it. There's some real jerks around here. Whether they're constantly argumentative, downright rude, always acting in bad faith, just plain trolls, overly opinionated on every subject, have the social skills of a Nausicaan, or whatever - the Fediverse is growing, and it's bound to attract toxicity in one way or another.

This post is mostly a PSA for anyone who's feeling like leaving because they're tired of dealing with things like that. I've been there several times myself, I know exactly how you feel, and I'm tired of seeing good people harassed off the platform.

Just remember that blocking is a very powerful way to stay in control of your experience. Be it a set of users, me specifically, a list of keywords, a whole community, or an entire instance: if it's causing you nothing but stress, hit that block button and see if that improves your experience here. Unlike the alien site, there is no limit to the number of entities you can block; you're in control.

Another thing to keep in mind is different instances have different vibes, and the experience can totally differ depending on the instance's moderation and federation policy.

In conclusion, your experience here can be what you make of it; don't be afraid to just block the parts that stress you out. You're not "creating an echo chamber" as everyone likes to say (often in bad faith) -- you're just taking care of yourself.

There's like, infinity videos to choose from.

Note: This is something I would have posted to "Movies and Television" before the merger.

Slashdot Summary:

Director James Cameron argues that blockbuster filmmaking can only survive if the industry finds ways to "cut the cost of [VFX] in half," with AI potentially offering solutions that don't eliminate jobs.

"If we want to continue to see the kinds of movies that I've always loved and that I like to make -- 'Dune,' 'Dune: Part Two,' or one of my films or big effects-heavy, CG-heavy films -- we've got to figure out how to cut the cost of that in half," Cameron said.

Rather than staff reductions, Cameron envisions AI accelerating VFX workflows: "That's about doubling their speed to completion on a given shot, so your cadence is faster and your throughput cycle is faster, and artists get to move on and do other cool things."

Hack-a-Day Summary

Ion thrusters are an amazing spacecraft propulsion technology, providing very high efficiency with relatively little fuel. Yet getting one to produce more thrust than that required to lift a sheet of A4 paper requires a lot of electricity. This is why they have been only used for applications where sustained thrust and extremely low fuel usage are important, such as the attitude management of satellites and other spacecraft. Now researchers in New Zealand have created a prototype magnetoplasmadynamic (MPD) thruster with a superconducting electromagnet that is claimed to reduce the required input power by 99% while generating a three times as strong a magnetic field.

Although MPD thrusters have been researched since the 1970s – much like their electrostatic cousins, Hall-effect thrusters – the power limitations on the average spacecraft have limited mission profiles. Through the use of a high-temperature superconducting electromagnet with an integrated cryocooler, the MPD thruster should be able to generate a very strong field, while only sipping power. Whether this works and is as reliable as hoped will be tested this year when the prototype thruster is installed on the ISS for experiments.

I'm testing a feature in my current dev branch and would like some feedback. The technical side of it is complete, but I'm curious about the human side of it.

When loading a removed comment in the comment section, it automatically fetches the removal reason from the modlog and appends it below 'Removed by Mod" on the comment. The "Removed by Mod" text is also linked to the modlog entry for the item.

Additionally, if you're a mod, it will also append, in a spoiler block, the original comment that was removed. Somewhere between 0.19.3 and 0.19.9, the Lemmy devs decided mods should no longer be able to see removed comments in their own communities, which I think is a huge regression (though thankfully admins can still see them).

Thoughts? Is this asking for drama, or would it be generally beneficial? Right now, in the dev branch, it just does it, but I can make it a user option.

U.S. memory chipmaker Micron Technology (MU.O), has told U.S. customers it plans to impose a surcharge on some products from Wednesday to account for U.S. President Donald Trump's new tariffs, four sources familiar with the matter said.

Micron's overseas manufacturing sites are largely based in Asia, including China, Taiwan, Japan, Malaysia and Singapore.

The company notified its customers in a letter that while Trump's announcement last week exempted semiconductors, which account for part of Micron's portfolio, the tariffs applied to memory modules and solid-state drives (SSDs), the sources said.

It repeats 4 times, and I don't know why. This could have been a GIF, but the footage is still cool.