Reach for the Stars @antares@qoto.org

https://mastodon.social/@planet4589

OMG! OMG! The God of Orbital Mechanics is here! 'Scuse me while I take some time to fan-ferret scream!

Last night's Hack Night was superb fun & our best-attended yet. I think we had about 70 people!

The evening's challenge was Huffman-encoding, and here's my attempt in #Haskell:

https://gist.github.com/686509b436c3e2ffb886192091a15d41

Unfinished! I was busy being host so I didn't get the full 90mins. #excuses

@freemo

Thank you, this is a good example of using reason appropriately to pursue noble goals.

Additionally, you've removed the character limit on your instance, making your users responsible for writing posts of the appropriate length instead of imposing a limitation.

This story teaches us that it is not enough to free oneself from the explicit control of central authorities, it is also necessary for everyone to be a responsible person so that the rights of all are respected.

Ironically, many people who implement these blocks are used to calling others "fascists" as a condemnation of authoritarianism.

@acjay You're best off blocking the whole instances yourself of certain instances as the instance admins couldn't care less over there.

Qoto has a very open stance here. Whenever possible, we won't suspend (block) servers. We leave that power in the hands of the users, because the users have all the tools available to them.

When an instance actually repeatedly harrass and go out of their way to do so, we might reconsider.

That said, I've blocked a fair amount of instances myself. It takes a bit of time to get to the sweet spot but after that it's a smooth ride.

We prefer this over the walled gardens that some other instances are, who then block more than necessary and make the federated space smaller for themselves.

I have to say, my initial experience on here is much better, in most ways, than my initial experience on Twitter.

I don't think most people who have a Twitter following know how hard it is to get any sort of interaction on there from a fresh start, if you're not prominent already.

The thing about virtual conferences is, even though I think I should *try*, I just can't justify clearing my schedule. So it just ends up being conference on top of normal work, which either means (1) 12 hour days (I did this for CSCW 2020); or (2) not really doing the conference (this is how it's shaking out this year 😢 ) #CSCW2022

My story on the sports-betting measures on their way to losing big in CA: https://www.marketwatch.com/story/sports-betting-measures-on-their-way-to-losing-big-in-california-11667974029
#prop26 #prop27

I am unbelievably proud of my friend, Maxwell Frost, who just made history as the first Gen Z-er elected to Congress! He’s just 25 years old! 👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻

#Midterms #GenZ #VoteBlue

Well. That's enough status updates. Instead, please enjoy this photo of city hall as Karl rolls in.

https://www.npr.org/2022/11/07/1134688501/lunar-eclipse-this-week-november-2022

Looks like there’s going to be a Total Lunar Eclipse tonight from the perspective of U.S.

Last one till 2025.

Physicist Lise Meitner was born #OTD in 1878. She discovered fission in uranium with Otto Frisch, and was the first person to understand both its mechanics and its implications.

Image: Atomic Heritage Foundation (photographer unknown)

Ten servers diverged in the fediverse,
And sorry I could not join them all,
And be one tooter, long I stood
And looked down one as I could
To where it bent in the federated feed;

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence;
Ten servers diverged in the fediverse, and I,
I took the one less tooted by,
And that has made all the difference.

Mastodon right now.

(Yes those are all birds)

Did you know that if you capitalize each word in a multi-word hashtag, #ScreenReaders can read them as words, but if you leave them lowercase, they can't? Well, now you know! So, for #accessibility, please capitalize words when there's more than one in a hashtag.

What is the future of Twitter?

#photography #fotografie #PhotoMonday #FotoMontag #landscape

Golden-Gate-Bridge, San Francisco

If you're worried about the uptime of various Mastodon instances let's cast our minds back to the time that Twitter was so bad at this that it was made into a children's book as a joke: https://www.macbarnett.com/billy-twitters-and-his-blue-whale-problem

Me: There's a concern that, with so many #MachineLearning PhDs being snapped up by industry, there won't anyone to train the next generation of researchers.

Colleague: I guess they'll just have to use .... unsupervised learning.