Sundar @digital_carver@qoto.org

@urusan Adding to the stew answers, Sambar (potato sambar especially) tastes its best after a reheat.

Still not a big fan, but if I can work with bash and vimscript, I can manage LaTeX as well.

#latex #unpopularopinions

Trying to learn LaTeX commands via an Anki deck now. LaTeX never made sense to me, seeming like a hodgepodge collection of commands, with bad names and ugly syntax. Learning multiple commands together using Anki, I can sort of get an overall picture and make better sense of LaTeX.

#anki #srs #latex #unpopularopinions

A good, well-researched timeline surrounding the Wuhan lab, its research on SARS-like coronaviruses, and more.

https://www.theweek.in/theweek/cover/2021/07/01/what-exactly-happened-in-wuhan.html

#COVID #lableak

“All to say: scientists create dangerous synthetic viruses to achieve “high-impact” scientific output. I’m not saying this is the only reason, but it is a significant reason. In my mind, likely the main reason. Ethical and technical arguments are the ego of science, but the id is always funding and prestige.”
#academia #publishorperish

https://erikhoel.substack.com/p/publish-and-perish

@vim

https://www.hillelwayne.com/post/intermediate-vim/

Vim articles often fall into two traps: too beginner-focused (not a bad thing, but makes them less useful for a regular user), or too focused obscure, niche features with limited usefulness. This one avoids both of those IMHO. Pragmatic tips from an experienced VIm user.

@theamazingweb

https://getawesomeness.herokuapp.com/

Use getAwesomeness() to retrieve all amazing awesomeness from Github

Helpful “best of” links about programming languages, developer tools, and more. Nicely organized, well curated.

Spent hours last night trying to get Nextcloud on Android do automatic syncing. Nope, only manual sync works, and in general the github issue conversations have left me with a bad impression of the Nextcloud Android app. I want to move away from Dropbox, but looks like it has to be to another proprietary service if I want reliabiliity. 🙁

@faho
Maybe it’s smart enough to trace the name’s etymology, and so translate the name too in your language.

குவாண்டம் உலகத்தில் ரகசியங்களைப் பாதுகாப்பது எப்படி? on Hindu Tamil.

A nice little article from public key cryptography to post-quantum cryptography. There are rough edges (from the space constraints of a newspaper and probably from translation inaccuracies too), but I’m glad to see a major #Tamil paper publishing something like this with all its complexity and detail. Kudos to சுபஸ்ரீ தேசிகன் (https://www.thehindu.com/profile/author/Shubashree-Desikan-249/).

@freemo
Can you explain why the normal way of doing percentages would be wrong, and why this is the right way?
Taking a different example, say I have 100 doubloons and split it equally to invest in three things, which give me 40% profit (1.4),160% profit (2.6) and 20% loss (0.8), my return would be ((100/3)1.4 + (100/3)2.6 + (100/3)*0.8) = 160 doubloons. Meaning overall average return on these investments is 1.6.
And the plain arithmetic mean of (1.4, 2.6, 0.8) is 1.6, while the geometric mean you suggest is 1.42. The arithmetic mean seems to be the one that correctly gives us the average return of these investments in this sense. In what context does the geometric mean make more sense?

@Gargron
Mastodon takes me back to the original promise of the Internet, that you can connect to real people across the world and have authentic conversations. There are no influencers that get trending by appealing to lowest common denominators, and there are no algorithms that manipulate my content for someone else’s profit.

I was looking through the #Gab code repository for a Hacker News discussion, and it was a weird feeling.

In the #Dresden Files, early on, Harry Dresden talks about how he’d always been taught that Magic comes from life, from the heart, and is a force for good - and how incongruous it was to see that magic being twisted for horrible goals, by the bad guys. That’s what this felt like, to see the familiar open source tooling and conventions that I see every day, being used for twisted hateful purposes there.

Somewhere out there, someone writing an oppressive mass surveillance tool is running git amend since they oopsied their last commit. Someone running a malware website is adjusting their CSS values. Someone profiting off child abuse is reading syntax discussions on StackOverflow. It’s a weird, icky feeling, to see these worlds collide.

@stux
Love the fact that the manager himself isn’t transparent - clever way of showing “do as I say, not as I do” management.

Peter Norvig’s #Python solutions to #AdventOfCode 2020: https://github.com/norvig/pytudes/blob/master/ipynb/Advent-2020.ipynb

(HTML Archive: http://archive.today/Xzyse in case the notebook doesn’t load.)

@urusan
“and can spend all your time doing whatever you feel like”
In that case, what exactly does becoming their pet mean? I assumed it meant you had to remain close to them all the time, etc. but if we do get full freedom, I’ll take this heavenly life in return for getting the label of “pet” attached - sounds like a good deal to me.