Hi friends,

Given the current state of AI and other technologies, do you consider higher education to still be worth pursuing? For those of you with children, will you be advising them to go to college?

I’m asking because I am enrolled in a masters program for statistics and have ~2 years left. I’m concerned that by the time I’m finished, the degree won’t be worth the paper it’s printed on. Like many of you, I work in software. Some days I think I should be learning an entirely different skill set in a non tech related field to diversify my value instead of doubling down on a potentially dying field.

I am not really interested in “you should pursue education for the sake of education”. While this is probably true, at the end of the day I need a way to make money to survive and education is the historical way of increasing one’s value in the job market. Furthermore, I can educate myself for far cheaper if education from a university is no longer considered valuable.

Anyone else in the same boat? Am I being dramatic? Would love to hear your thoughts.

TL;DR: NASA's public Planetary Data System is at risk of being shut down. Anyone have any ideas for backing it up?

Hi everyone,

Bit of a long-shot here, but I wanted to try on high-quality tildes before jumping back into the cesspool of reddit. I'm posting it in ~science rather than ~space as I figure interest in backing up public data is broader than just the space community.

I work regularly with NASA's Planetary Data System, or PDS. It's a massive (~3.5petabytes!!) archive of off-world scientific data (largely but not all imaging data). PDS is integral for scientific research - public and private - around the world, and is maintained, for free, by NASA (with support of a number of Academic institutions).

The current state of affairs for NASA is grim:

• NASA Lays Off ISS Workers at Marshall Space Flight Center
• More layoffs at JPL
• NASA is sinking its flagship science center during the government shutdown — and may be breaking the law in the process, critics say

And as a result, I (and many of my industry friends) have become increasingly concerned that PDS will be taken down as NASA is increasingly torn down for spare parts and irreparably damaged. This administration seems bent on destroying all forms of recording-keeping and public science, so who knows how long PDS will be kept up. Once it's down, it'll be a nightmare to try and collect it all again from various sources. I suspect we'll permanently lose decades worth of data - PDS includes information going all the way back to the Apollo missions!

As such, we've been pushing to back-up as much of PDS as we can, but have absolutely no hope of downloading it all within the next year or two, nevermind in a few months if the current cuts impact us soon.

If you or someone you know would be interested in helping figure out how we can back-up PDS before it's too late, please let me know here or in a DM. I've already tried reaching out to the Internet Archive, but did not hear anything back from them.

Edit: to clarify, the larger problem is download speeds - we've topped out at 20mb/s with 8 connections.

Was there ever a write-up on why Tildes was architected the way it was? For example, why Pyramid instead of the usual suspects like Django or Flask? I'd be curious to read the reasoning from the developer(s) themselves.

I occasionally watch some travel videos and lately I've been getting a lot of videos of middle east countries on YouTube, I'm just curious why. I know there have been some new developments like the shebara resort and Ain Dubai. but is that the only reason?