Show newer

@Placholdr so way back in the bad old days, there was "the IRC network" in the way we have "the fediverse". Now there are many - EFnet, Undernet, etc. Each of these comprises multiple distinct servers forwarding messages among themselves, but there's no longer a single unified network, just these smaller fragments. Something like that nearly happened to the Fediverse with the "isolate Gab" movement a couple years ago, but it didn't amount to a complete split.

@Placholdr It'd be similar to leaving Twitter for the Fediverse. IRC and XMPP have the advantage that the protocol's open, so you can use whatever client you prefer, and XMPP is also federated (originally IRC was too, but today it's fragmented) so you can join whatever instance you prefer.

They also have similar downsides. It's a communication tool, so there's little utility in it if the people with whom you want to communicate refuse to switch from Twitter/Discord. You'll also find more bugs in the software than you would with the proprietary alternative, unfortunately.

@realcaseyrollins@social.teci.world @realcaseyrollins@narwhal.city It sounds basically like what happened with Georgia's Abkhazia/South Ossetia regions in 2008.

@realcaseyrollins@social.teci.world @realcaseyrollins@narwhal.city sort of. Per CBC, Russia recognised Luhansk and Donetsk breakaway regions as independent countries today. So from the Russian point of view, they're not invading Ukraine itself, they're just expelling the Ukrainian military from the portions of L+D that it currently occupies.

@freemo @trinsec mainly the problem is that the alphabet of legal characters is too small, especially relative to the length of each guess. 10 digits + 4 operations = 14 characters in the alphabet, versus 7 characters in a guess not counting the mandatory equals sign, lets you cover every possible character in your first two guesses. Yeah, you have to then figure out the permutation and watch out for duplicated characters, but it's not enough to make life difficult in the face of all the information you have by that point.

Satisfaction is... finding the sweet spot in your parallelised code parameters, so that it hovers at about 95% of CPU time, and the machine stays responsive for daily use

@aral What does it mean to give individuals, not corporations, the means of communication? People own their cell phones, but corporations own the networks. Even if people own their servers, the ISPs will continue to own the infrastructure linking your server to my client. Encryption may mitigate the privacy risks but you're still paying rent to deliver your content to me.

On top of that, the idea that this URL corresponds to this IP address, corresponds to this physical machine, is oversimplified in the modern web. A practical consequence is that, if you have your own server, you're at a performance disadvantage compared to a competitor who can serve clients from a local node in a CDN, even if he has to rent that network from a corporation.

@freemo what does the temperature vs depth profile look like? You don't appear to be dressed as if you expected a steep gradient.

@realcaseyrollins Oh, it sounds like a Seagrams/Schweppe's/Canada Dry type of drink, something like that?

My go-to is Reeds, kind of unusual in that the sweeteners are honey and pineapple juice rather than sugar/HFCS. So definitely has a unique taste. I could see a comparison to Sprite, but probably more juicy rather than less.

Blenheim #3 gets my vote for "most flavourful" but also "why on earth would you want that much ginger!?" Tastes absolutely nothing like a Sprite.

@realcaseyrollins Mind if I ask what it is? I used to drink quite a lot of ginger beer & you have me curious

@louisrcouture yes, but you can't stop them from selling or giving away the source once they have it. So if your business model is to charge for a copy of the software, it won't last long in an environment where people upload your source to github or whatever.

@stardust Because of federation, I believe. Once other servers have local copies of the toot, those local copies could fall out of sync (ActivityPub doesn't guarantee consistency). So with Delete+Redraft, everyone who knows of the existence of object X agrees on what it is. They might be unaware it's been deleted, or not see replies from certain instances, or whatever; but there's no disagreement about what it is. But if you allow editing, that's no longer the case - for example, maybe a poll was removed, and remote instances will try to send votes to what's now a plain-text post, confusing the server.

What might work would be to make an "edit" a self-reply with an annotation to that effect in the metadata. Then clients could grab the parent (older-version) post, and display replies in that thread with a warning that they are responses to an older version, like what Wikipedia does if you look at earlier revisions of a page. Clients unaware of the new feature would fail reasonably gracefully and show it as a normal self-reply, because under the hood it's a new status with a new object ID, not really an edit. It just looks that way by adding an annotation with those semantics.

@Mastodon

@freemo Oh man, hope you feel better soon!

I just spent a bit looking at the sequential case and I think I've proved it's impossible. Obviously the penultimate state can't have four heads or four tails, because then you're just hoping that by luck you happen to get the odd one out. So it's got to be a three-two split, of which there are two types.

Your first choice is completely blind, so it's possible you choose one of the majority (which I've labelled black in the diagram, but could be heads or tails). Let's stipulate that's the case, so there's no new information gained after the first move and we can predetermine the second move. If you flip a second black coin, you have to know exactly where the third black coin is to guarantee a win. If you flip a white coin, you have to know exactly where the second white coin is to guarantee a win. But in either case, if you draw one of the pairs shown in the diagrams, there are two possible orientations of the board - you know you're on one of the lines of a certain colour, but not which, and consequently not where the final piece you need is.

@freemo Could you please type up your strategy? I haven't really looked at the sequential choice version, but it might offer clues to solving the general case.

@freemo

> People are going to get excited and shout from the roof tops when they are winning.

People are going to shout from the rooftops if they stand to benefit from increased demand. If I think the price of X will continue to go up, I'll quietly buy up X and not brag about how much it's already gone up. If I'm not so sure, then maybe I start trying to stoke public demand to get it on an upward swing again.

@mushambo

@freemo You're half right. Your test is necessary but not sufficient, so it'll sometimes answer "possible" when there isn't really a solution.

For example, five boxes three choices. Your selection modes are:
00111
01011
Their bitwise union is:
01111
which has a single zero, so by your algorithm it should be solvable. But in fact it isn't. If it were, you'd have a nearly-solved state, where, no matter how the table was spun, you'd be able to guarantee you either get *all* the remaining heads or *all* the remaining tails.

There's another failure mode too in that "standard form" isn't necessarily the worst-case form. Consider six boxes three choices:
000111
001011
001101
010101
Their bitwise union is 011111. But if we rewrite the selection modes, rotating the second and third ones, as
000111
010110
010011
010101
then we get a bitwise union of 010111 which is clearly unsolvable.

@mushambo because the behaviour of cryptocurrency enthusiasts is so much like that of scammers that it sets off our BS detectors every time we try to read up on it. Every time bitcoin goes up, there are thousands of people bragging about how well their portfolios are doing, and when it goes back down they all disappear. It's *exactly* the behaviour of someone who is trying to convince me to buy an asset when it's already overpriced.

Crypto might not actually be such a terrible investment but anyone who spends significant time on the internet develops such a strong nope reflex to "I made X thousand dollars this week doing Y" posts that by default our assumption is:
- I wouldn't make close to X doing Y
- you somehow stand to profit off me doing Y

@freemo some further observations:

For any number of boxes:
If you're allowed to choose all the boxes, a win is trivially possible: flip all to heads.
If you're allowed to choose all but one of the boxes, a win is trivially possible: flip all to heads; if you then see a tails turn it to heads, if not turn all coins to tails.

For five boxes:
There's no solution with three choices, because there's no penultimate state from which you can guarantee that you'll choose all the remaining heads or all the remaining tails. So five boxes has only the trivial solutions.

For six boxes:
I have a solution for four choices in five moves, which may not be optimal (I haven't searched exhaustively for other strategies).

The number of patterns for given numbers of boxes and choices is from the OEIS: oeis.org/A047996, under "example". I don't understand the notation they use for the generating formula, but they call it a "circular binomial coefficient" which makes sense.

Show older

K‮ly‬e's choices:

Qoto Mastodon

QOTO: Question Others to Teach Ourselves
An inclusive, Academic Freedom, instance
All cultures welcome.
Hate speech and harassment strictly forbidden.