K‮ly‬e @khird@qoto.org

@msprout reminds me of the Uncyclopedia parody article about the Faith:

> The status of Báhá’í as a major religion is evident from all of those thingies it has over the vowels. Residents of the fiftieth U.S. state who insist on spelling it Hawai'i should love Báhá’í, if only based on all the things it gives them to do with their writing hand.

@msprout idea: a circular hue-value picker, but hue is scaled to the traditional "colour wheel" so yellow is equidistant from red and blue, not red and green. To get some more room in the orange tones I'd gladly give up the acres of cyan the normal picker has.

@realcaseyrollins it's a hard problem to modify anything in the Bill of Rights. The founding fathers are held in such high esteem that people react almost as if you're proposing to repeal and replace a chapter of the Bible. I think we might get there at some point, especially now that there's a greater awareness of some of the less praiseworthy aspects of their lives, but it's not imminent.

@realcaseyrollins

> What is the difference between a weapon, an "arm", and a destructive device?

This is defined in legislation, I think from the thirties, probably amended since.

> There isn't really a valid case to make that states that preventing people from buying guns doesn't prevent them from owning and possessing them.

Right, but AFAIK there isn't a legal precedent that such workarounds are covered by the amendment in the same way that e.g. poll taxes and literacy tests are covered by the enfranchisement amendments. It does have some effect though in that the government cannot make you give up a gun you currently own (contrast with Canada, where it's mandatory to surrender guns added to the prohibited list) or stop you from walking about with them.

> We know this, and this is the point of my post; what is the constitutional basis for this notion

I think generally the "constitutional basis" is taken to be the combination of preceding clause about the well-regulated militia, the general welfare clause, and the elastic clause; but that's more of an excuse and the underlying basis is really the acknowledgement that an absolutist interpretation isn't such a good idea any more. Compare Japan's constitutional prohibition on having a military: once they had two nuclear-armed communist neighbours, they began to interpret the rule so they could have this "it's not really a military, honest" self defence force.

@realcaseyrollins various reasons. Off the top of my head I can think of:
- Some types of weapons aren't legally recognised as "arms" but rather "destructive devices" and thus not protected by the amendment
- The amendment only guarantees ownership and possession rights, so the government is allowed to ban manufacture, import, sale, etc.
- Some restrictions aren't viewed by the courts as infringement in the same way that defamation/incitement/obscenity laws don't abridge your speech rights

@markmccaughrean Can you elaborate on this? It would seem that if you launch from the equator and want to hit a polar orbit, you have to not only get up to orbital velocity in the north or south direction, but also get 460m/s worth of westward delta V to shed the initial eastward velocity you had from the earth's rotation. If you didn't do this, you wouldn't be aimed directly at the pole in the inertial frame.

There's probably something I'm missing, so I'm happy to be corrected here.

@grandmaBates

@realcaseyrollins it introduces other dependencies, i.e. possible failure modes. Remember that a conventional telephone doesn't even plug into the mains. If you switch to VoIP, you depend on not only the online telephony provider, but also your ISP, and also the power grid; if you have POTS you only depend on the telephony provider. In turn that makes it less useful as an emergency means of communication.

@louiscouture I've used both heavily at different times. Octave will accept pretty much all valid Matlab code, but the reverse is not true (Matlab doesn't support Octave's use of x++ to increment x, for example, and it's pickier about single vs. double quotes). So if you need to submit code for the grader to run, you should at least do the remote desktop thing afterward to verify your code is Matlab-legal. If you just need to submit your results, Octave's richer syntax is certainly nice to have.

Matlab's user interface beats the pants off Octave. In Matlab I could use the variable window almost like a spreadsheet to edit arrays in-place, delete failed commands from the history window, copy-paste large blocks of commands from the history window into my editor or command line, etc. Octave's mindset is different - the GUI is an afterthought and by default it just runs in terminal.

Matlab has better external tooling. There is a bunch of field-specific "toolboxes" but also a repository of user-submitted functions that you'll only have access to with a Mathworks account, and the licence forbids you from using those functions in anything other than Matlab as I recall. This may be less of a problem now with Github's increased prominence.

@dragfyre a couple thoughts:

First, re: boundaries, an anecdote. A local community member spent some time pioneering in a Pacific island country. He identified some differences in cultural norms, notably that their threshold for eye contact before it was perceived as staring ("bad face") was much lower, and their threshold for personal space was much higher, so that everyone stood several metres apart when queueing up at the McDonald's.
I later imagined the reverse, a visitor from that country to the West - he'd probably feel very uncomfortable that everyone is, from his perspective, staring at him and crowding him, but he has no real standing to demand more separation in the lines at our McDonald's, or that the cashier not look him in the face when serving him. The thought experiment exposed to me a fundamental problem in the way we talk about personal boundaries: we don't, in fact, unilaterally set our own; they're the result of social consensus. The debate over quote toots is a natural and healthy attempt to establish that consensus - a good chunk of the Fediverse now expects that functionality, but many existing instances don't.

Second, the way quotes are implemented here on QOTO is that the text includes a link prefixed with QT. Quote-aware clients simply follow the link and render the toot; the vanilla frontend ignores this and just gives you the raw hyperlink. I don't see any practical way to implement "forbid people elsewhere on the internet to paste a link to my post" with how ActivityPub works, but maybe we don't need to.
My understanding of the anti-quote argument is that it enables unhealthy behaviours because, unlike the reply functionality, it doesn't notify the original author so he can't rebut the quoting author's attached commentary, leading to one-sided "dunking" instead of open discussion. So what if we approached this from the other side? Rather than preventing the behaviour, simply detect it and issue the notification as you would for any other interaction. The technical end would look something like this: when your instance becomes aware of a toot containing a link to a post on your instance, via either ActivityPub or the Referer header of an incoming request, and that link isn't already in-thread wrt the link target, generate a notification for the original author ("@user@example.org quoted your toot") and add the quoted post and its author to the in-reply-to-id and in-reply-to-account-id fields so it'll be treated as in-thread in case you become aware of it again.

@realcaseyrollins if you can cut down the video to a few seconds of dialogue I would think you could upload that to e.g. dropbox under fair use rules. Your commands look pretty much like what I'd be trying though so I think you're on the right track

@realcaseyrollins the documentation suggests it's possible, but I don't think I have anything with PGS subtitles that I could test. If you point me to a test case I can download from somewhere, I'll take a look

@markmccaughrean Miracle Whip tries to position itself this way but I don't think it ever became an idiom like "a bit Marmite".

https://youtube.com/watch?v=hrmIwwQ-sv8
https://youtube.com/watch?v=_-qh11W7Iuo

@realcaseyrollins here's a Bash script that shows what I meant. Working from a random frame is slower than from a timestamp but it gets there in the end. You just have to provide two arguments: video file and subtitle file.

#!/bin/bash

framecount=$(ffprobe -v error -select_streams v:0 -count_packets -show_entries stream=nb_read_packets -of csv=p=0 "$1");
(( randomframe = ( $RANDOM * 2**15 + $RANDOM ) % $framecount ));

ffmpeg -copyts -i "$1" -vf "subtitles=$2,select=gte(n\,$randomframe)" -vframes 1 "$1.png"

@realcaseyrollins looks like you would just have to pass -copyts as an option alongside -vf select

@realcaseyrollins I think a shell script around ffmpeg is the way to go.

-count_frames to get the range
-vf select to just grab a certain frame