Notices by Strange Attractor (strangeattractor@refactorcamp.org), page 17

this little one right here did a good job...I'm proud of her :blobcatcoffee:

Early unit of computing power: one "kilogirl" was equivalent to a thousand hours of manual computing labor

Do I know anybody here who (a) solves US-style crosswords with some regularity and (b) is at least kind of a programmer?

geer cherries, painted by deborah griscom passmore, 1897

mahaleb cherry cherries, painted by royal charles steadman, 1920

st. medard cherries, painted by royal charles steadman, 1920

lafayette plums, painted by royal charles steadman, 1919

arctic peaches, painted by ellen isham schutt, 1908

position: 0.31482423103933627 + -0.42135185694245897i
pixel width: 3.174016181144383e-14

1. In the beginning, I spent a lot of time on the global timeline. Yes, it's kinda a dumpster fire initially, but it becomes more useful as you build up more off-instance followers. Signal-to-noise is never great, but it's a place to start.

Follow anyone who says a couple of interesting things, or who otherwise looks interesting. You'll probably unfollow a lot of them within a few weeks, but it helps improve the off-instance signal-to-noise.

Remember: Mastodon moves more slowly than Twitter (network-wide conversations seem to have a much longer tail), and there's no algorithm to suggest people/toots to you (overall I think this makes interactions/relationships more stable, but it does raise the barrier to entry).

It took me a few months before I started to find my home timeline consistently interesting. But now that it's there I find the discussions I have/read on Mastodon far more rewarding than what I have on Twitter these days.

Anybody know any good Nintendo Switch games with online multiplayer? Looking for games to play with my sister who lives across the country. I know Smash Bros, Mario Kart and Splatoon are the big ones but how about indie recommendations?

I love rock music videos where somebody's "playing" electric guitar in, like, the middle of a grassy field, without a wire, amp, or speaker in sight.

Like... do they think they're fooling anybody? Or are we supposed to be in on the joke?

Sometimes low-tech is a cooler solution than high-tech.

This sensor device detects if your package was handled roughly during transport: no electronics, just clever engineering.

Copyright terms that enrich a tiny number of great-grandchildren at the expense of cultural preservation are a bad deal. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/01/public-domain-back-it-still-needs-defenders