Klye @khird@qoto.org
Mod
Joined Sep 2018
@freemo Looks like you resolved this. For future reference though, I can read/write French okay; I just can't understand it by ear.
Lots of celebratory gunfire mixed in with the fireworks this year. I'm sandwiched between office buildings to the east and a pretty expensive residential area to the west, so I wouldn't have expected that much shooting around here. But I'd guess I've heard upwards of a hundred rounds fired just now, maybe two hundred.
@freemo Reminds me of an old xkcd punchline: You don't use science to show that you're right; you use science to become right.
@freemo "I'd rather you agreed with me than were well informed, so I'll only tell you the facts that support my position. That way you can feel like you came to your own conclusion based on the facts, but you really just believe what I want you to."
@freemo Thanks for keeping the lights on around here! I'll continue to do my best
@nanko Here's one I've been kicking around but probably won't get to this winter. There's a musical ornament set called Santa's Marching Band - see the link below. These can be had used pretty cheaply, but they only play a preprogrammed set of carols, which gets mighty old over an extended advent/holiday season. So the idea is to gut the controller box and replace its contents with an Arduino that reads a simple MIDI file and gives the bellringers the appropriate commands to play it.
@gawrsh ooh that does look nice, but... 100USD/mo/line? You can get five lines for that money. Hard to justify the cost just to give the metaphorical finger to snoops.
You may be interested in this previous conversation on the topic: https://qoto.org/@alex_/103263224293042663
@lhackworth Thanks! Looked it up, and that's the contact email for each instance, not the registration email for the user. So if you see unusual traffic in your logs, you can send an email to the responsible admin. It basically saves you the trouble of figuring out which instance made the request (reverse DNS may be ambiguous if the IP address hosts multiple instances), going to that site, and finding the contact info for the admin.
@lhackworth Where do emails appear in the log? Some kind of cookie or header?
Erm, I don't think that "tip" is meant to be taken seriously. Apart from Mastodon actually having an abundance of CS guys and their opinions not carrying a great deal of weight, here are some other tips he's posted:
> mastodon tip: when you report someone, it goes straight to eugen, and he is required by eu law to respond within 3 days by suspending the account you reported or submitting a detailed account of why they didn't violate any rules, which you can then appeal to the european court for online crimes
https://octodon.social/@esvrld/105402884549707503
> mastodon tip: if you're accused of saying something racist or antisemitic, the best response is to accuse them of being queermisic against you in return. there are very few lgbtqi+ people on mastodon, so this nearly always works!
All* the countries ahead of the USA on the list are ones that actively import plastic waste for profit. Nominally it's a recycling operation, but oversight is lacking in many of these places and plenty of it ends up not being recycled for one reason or another. It's ultimately Western countries' garbage in large part.
* China actually banned such imports in 2018. The attribution is vague, not including a date - I suspect the author used data from before the Chinese ban.
Working around Twitter in 2020, a play in two acts.
***Summer 2020***
**My browser**: Hi, #Twitter! I'm #PaleMoon.
**Twitter**: We don't like you, so we're going to pop up a modal warning on every page you request to force you into retirement.
**My browser**: That's okay, I can suppress the warning with #uBlockOrigin.
***This week***
**My browser**: Hi, Twitter! I'm Pale Moon.
**Twitter**: Seriously, how are you still here? Every page is now an error page advertising browsers we like.
**My browser**: Wait, that's it? I can't just suppress the warning to show the webpage behind it?
**Twitter**: No. And if you pretend to be a supported browser, we'll serve you content that you can't display correctly and it'll look stupid.
**My browser**: The hell? You're just a microblogging service. Your roots are in SMS messages, for crying out loud. Why on earth can you not make do with normal #HTML?
**Twitter**: This is 2020; who would want a normal HTML webpage anyway?
**My browser**: Hmm, who would want normal HTML, you say?
*puts on false moustache*
Hi, Twitter! I'm Googlebot!
You could probably get away with a transient setup if you pass it over something like an oil-flow visualisation medium. The flow changes direction over each oblique shock, so there should be sharp corners in the traces. And that's likely safer anyway, because the observer doesn't have to get near the exhaust while it's moving at supersonic speeds, and the exhaust doesn't have to be hot enough to glow for visibility. Run the demo with everyone a safe distance away, then bring over the oil plate for everyone to see the streak pattern.
The problem is you only get diamonds in an overexpanded supersonic jet (i.e. lower pressure than ambient air), which means you need a good idea of what the properties of the high-pressure combustion products would be so you can design an appropriate nozzle to bring them down to below-ambient pressures. These combustion products are probably highly nonuniform and may even still be reacting as they pass through the nozzle, so the problem of nozzle design would be trickier than in steady flow.
@freemo Thanks for trying! I'll do my best with the available tools, and if you do wind up with your hands in the database at some point and wouldn't mind assembling those lists, I'd be happy to work through them.
@freemo Happy to help & earn my keep as a mod.
Do you know if there's a way to run more complex queries than simple searches? For example, if I could get the set of local users who have a link in their bio and zero posts, that would include virtually all the SEO spam accounts but pare away most of the real users. It'd be much easier to work through that list. Another useful one would be the set of users who have posted only toots containing links.
Friends, today was the anniversary of the Polytechnique attack. Please take a moment to consider the obstacles still faced by women and minority STEM students in many parts of the world, and, if you can, lend your support as they confront those obstacles.
@freemo oh I see. That's less different than I thought initially - actually pretty close to how I do it fast, but when I slow down to type it out for someone else, I break out the `(n-k)!` term as a separate step.
@freemo I'm not sure I understand how you reason it from that description. Do you mean that you first arrive at the `k!` and `(n-k)!` factors in the denominator and only recognise the `n!` numerator at the end?
🇳🇱