Notices by ❄️🦊 (icefox@octodon.social)

I certainly don't want to live in a country where Kavanaugh is a member of the supreme court. He's a psycho.

But I also don't want to live in a country where the best defense against that is slander, and where people are held liable for their mistakes of 35 years past only when they become "important" and then suddenly it's a crime that is worth being interested in. And the prosecutors are willing to cut any corner to prosecute because it serves their political ends.

All burn.

I need to disconnect a bit more in life. Anyone have any suggestions for a good dumbphone?

Feels a bit odd to be tooting this from my smartphone, but, there you are.

This guy is my new hero: https://www.npr.org/2017/08/20/544861933/how-one-man-convinced-200-ku-klux-klan-members-to-give-up-their-robes

A black musician decided to learn more about racism and why it is the way it is, so he talking with KKK members and interviewing them in hopes of writing a book. Turns out after just hanging out with him long enough, KKK members tended to stop being members. Including three Grand Dragon's.

The full interview is a hoot, but I haven't tracked down a proper podcast yet. I need to get a copy of this guy's book, too.

#racism

All you #data and #science types, a reminder that this is a thing: https://www.autodeskresearch.com/publications/samestats

On the up side, I can now derive some Bayesian hypothesis testing logic from scratch just by thinking hard about it.

On the downside, I loathe most everything that's happened to give me this power.

@Shotagonist @socketwench I feel like at some point the common impression of the word "diplomacy" became "being nice", rather than "getting what you want out of someone who doesn't want to give it to you"...

Man, one of the wacky awesome things about #Rust is that the ecosystem is so *young* it's really easy to contribute.

I start out writing a small #webassembly interpreter for fun and next thing I know I'm three levels upstream submitting patches to the official webassembly binary tools, just 'cause I need some damn bindings to their test driver functions...

Heard a great comment about #ipfs today: "Nothing can be deleted, but it can be forgotten."

Plato came across Diogenes knee-deep in a stream washing vegetables.

"You know," said Plato, "If you knew how to pay court to Kings, you wouldn't have to wash vegetables".

"And," replied Diogenes, "If you knew how to wash vegetables, you wouldn't have to pay court to Kings."

Cogent, if somewhat superficial, discussion of federation vs p2p architecture: http://beza1e1.tuxen.de/federation_future.html

I'm not convinced cause I think there are uses for both. Nothing stops distributed systems from being able to have "server" nodes that collate information for clients that don't want to participate in the full p2p network

Ah, that familiar, dour feeling when you kill -9 a process and nothing happens, meaning it's sitting somewhere deep in the kernel (or more likely, a driver) like a sludgy, lurking toad, waiting for something... waiting, waiting, until the stars burn out...

In other news, owning an old house is really fascinating. You don't just inherit the decisions of their previous owners, you inherit the decisions of their 10-year-old sons.

"Oh this terribly-applied wallpaper hidden under a layer of hastily-applied cheap wood paneling makes so much more sense when you consider it the work of young boys. After all, there was the time I glued sticky-tack to the wall in my sister's bedroom while trying to hang a poster..."

@bstacey An engineer who had worked a lot on self-driving car once explained to me: self-driving cars just won't have the nuance to be able to make that sort of decision, since about the only valid decision it can ever make to avoid a crash is to "slow down and stop as effectively as possible".

If it can't slow down quickly enough in response to, say, a pedestrian running out into the street... then it is going too fast to begin with and its control software will not let it go that fast.

@djsundog Actually an Arduino or Pi type system as a PCIe card would be kinda cool...

Ah, winter solstice. The *real* end and start to the year, where the darkness once again starts losing to the light. The day when dark and light are in perfect imbalance, the instant in the pendulum's swing when it hangs weightless. I'm about as mystical as a rock, but that doesn't mean there aren't times that have Meaning.

Happy Solstice, everyone.

Hey, someone's making an actual ternary computer, apparently: https://hackaday.io/project/28579-homebrew-ternary-computer

@djsundog you also develop things like anxiety, low self esteem, imposter syndrome and alcoholism.

@Mycroft It's no better than any other chat program, its encryption is bogus, it takes your phone number and scans your phone contacts, and automatically sends contact invites to people in it who have telegram. Depending on what one wants to use Telegram for, this can be awkward.

I do not recommend any program that can result in your mom and/or boss getting messages saying "BondageBunnyButt68.8 just joined Telegram! Want to connect?"

Boy it's a pain that Square costs $0.30 a transaction. The financial industry is such a racket.

Hmm, what's the cost per transaction for Bitcoin these days?

Oh it's nearly $80. Yeah entirely unregulated financial markets are so much better, right.

@natecull part of the problem is that mathematics is pure but the machines that implement them are impure

Part of the problem is humans just suck at building systems

Part of the problem is we still don't understand the details

Programming is currently like engineering in the 1850s, when the laws were empirical, there were lots of colliding locomotives and collapsing bridges, and every machine shop made it's own, incompatible nuts and bolts.