K‮ly‬e @khird@qoto.org

@peterdrake possibly dumb idea: label the answer candidates with colours instead of or in addition to letters and use an Uno deck, which would be enough for 25 students after removing the wild cards. Looks like they generally retail for about 6USD. There's a version called ColorADD in case some students are colourblind, but I think the shades are sufficiently different it shouldn't pose much of a barrier to accessibility if you just use a normal deck.

@peterdrake heartburn medicine? @freemo

@realcaseyrollins yeah, a rubber dome membrane one. Mildly interested in getting a mechanical one to see if I like it but never became enough of a priority to actually spend money on.

@Theraviranjankr I think your equations need proofreading

@worldsendless I think you need root to listen on ports less than 1024

@louiscouture *hand typing svg in notepad*

Krita looks neat, but (a) more of a competitor to GIMP than to Inkscape and (b) depends on three dozen KDE and Qt libraries I don't have installed, not gonna go that route unless I find my existing tools inadequate.

Inkscape is generally fine but the snap-to-align works really inconsistently. I find myself fighting it a fair bit to get the features I want correctly positioned. Then again, I use it to make vector diagrams and so on, not visual art, so those limitaitons might not be relevant to its target audience.

@louiscouture Welcome back! :)

@floatingpoint hey! count me in

Today I found out the hard way that trying to get a double-double at Starbucks results in three ounces of straight espresso (two ounce-and-a-half double shots).

Also if you ask for a hot tea with milk you have about a one-in-two chance, over the long run, of getting a chai latte instead.

In case anyone at the company happens upon this and would care to update the recipes, those drink orders are for (1) coffee with two measures each of cream and sugar, and (2) boiling water with a teabag and a measure of milk, respectively.

One of today's winners of QOTO's spam-to-ban prize had a bio which invited the reader to "[d]iscover the world of cats mating near you [...] ." I did a double and triple take on reading that, but that's exactly what it said.

@freeschool It's commonly used here, and not typically read as particularly condescending. A reasonable expansion might be, "Act as you see fit." It's used to politely excuse oneself from an argument than has reached impasse, without conceding on the merits.

For example, suppose Alice thinks some financial asset is likely to appreciate and advocates investing in it, while Bob thinks it is unlikely to be profitable and considers it a poor investment. They each attempt to convince the other of their respective positions, but are unsuccessful. Alice loses hope that Bob will accept her arguments, but still considers his own reasoning unpersuasive. She eventually tells Bob, "You do you," to excuse herself from the discussion instead of wasting further time as she expects no further progress to come of it. The implication is that Bob may make an unwise decision, if Alice is correct and he fails to invest profitably, but Alice will accept his choice without further attempting to influence him.

However, it might be seen as condescending or rude if a person uses it prematurely. Since he's excusing himself from the argument, it can, as you note, serve as a tactic to preempt a rebuttal and retain the last word. To imply that you have no hope of your interlocutor changing his mind but that neither can he persuade you of his correctness, before he's fully laid out his claims and responded to your own, does not suggest that you have a great deal of respect for his ability to reason and arrive at a defensible conclusion. Roughly speaking, subjects of greater importance should merit more effort to break the impasse before withdrawing from debate in this way, while more trivial ones can be ended sooner.

It's also sometimes inappropriate to use with a social superior - if you're expected to do what a particular person tells you, telling him that *he* can act as he sees fit might be construed as a declaration that *you* will not be acting as he sees fit and seen as an act of insubordination.

@Sheilaniriain

@Amikke that was a good enough recommendation for me to start researching it - so far I'm reasonably happy with Mint but you are absolutely correct that installing up-to-date packages can be a real pain. It looks like NixOS has its own specific package system though. Can you share how you've found that to work? I've found that most of the little bespoke distros that don't just inherit a major distro's repositories leave out software I want.

@fisunov QOTO has this feature too! You'll find a button labelled "Add New Hashtag Follow" in Settings > Follows and Subscriptions > Following Hashtags.

@PawelK I played with some numbers on this.

> Would converting the videos to ASCII arts help in compression? By how much?

To start with, I assume the default terminal size of 80x24 characters and the sixteen-colour terminal palette, and only printable ASCII characters (no UTF-whatever, just byte values of 20 through 7E inclusive).

Each character can have a background and a foreground colour selected independently by means of escape sequences. For sixteen colours, the ASCII sequence looks like
- escape character, 1B
- left bracket, 5B
- two bytes identifying the foreground colour
- semicolon, 3B
- two or three bytes identifying the background colour
- lowercase m, 6D

Any text retains this style until the next modification. In the worst case, you'll have no consecutive colours and thus be forced to alter the foreground and background colour for each character separately, and your backgrounds will all be "bright" colours requiring a three-byte code. This adds up to ten bytes per character - nine in the escape sequence and one printable. With our standard terminal size of 80x24, that's 19.2kB per frame, which at a framerate of 25fps is 3.84Mbps. That's pretty heavy for such a low-fidelity end product, and certainly not competitive with real video codecs. But you can display it with relatively simple tools, just loading the next 1920 characters every forty milliseconds and stuffing them in the terminal.

> What could be the structure of the compressed stream for max space saved?

However, if you're allowed to compress it, you could knock the bitrate down by a lot. A simple compression algorithm would be to store the colour code as a single byte (16 foreground * 16 background = 256 codes) followed by the printable character, which instantly cuts your bitrate by a factor of five: 768kbps. Your tools just need to be smart enough to reconstitute the ten-character escape sequence from the one-byte code. If you have a lot of similarity frame-to-frame (for example, a screencap of a desktop), you might get some additional benefit by running gzip or some other lossless compression tool. For practical purposes, I'm going to pull a number out of my backside and say you wind up around half a megabit per second for a filmed video. So if that's less than your original bitrate, you save some space in compression - but it's still going to look like ASCII art. If there isn't a technical reason you need ASCII art (for example, you're trying to watch it in a TTY with no X server running) you'll certainly get better results just compressing to half a megabit per second in a real video codec.

> Would chroma per character suffice or would chroma per pixel be required?

Because terminals handle colours on a character-by-character basis, you can't address specific pixels of a character to assign them their own colours. And you don't know the font of the user's terminal in advance, so you won't even know what a character's dimensions will be as rendered or which pixels will be foreground/background. Trying to fiddle with specific pixels, even if the terminal provided a means to do so, would be heinously unportable, so let's just leave it at per-character.

@skyblond what does the Asian text say? I'd hope it contains a descriptive error message.

@realcaseyrollins I suppose you could block the necessary API call at the server level. Mastodon uses nginx, so you would want something like the following:

```
location /api/v1/statuses {
if ($request_method = POST ) {
return 403;
}
}
```