Klye @khird@qoto.org
Mod
Joined Sep 2018
Just learned the specs for both MBR and GPT flavours of partition table, and rolled my own in a hex editor to solve a problem that `fdisk` and `parted` weren't able to handle. It's hard to express how pumped I was when this box booted, but I think Andy Weir did a pretty good job in "The Martian":
> **LOG ENTRY: SOL 211**
> I am smiling a great smile. The smile of a man who ****ed with his car and *didn't break it*. This is considerably more rare than you might think.
@mitch I don't think that'll be their problem. The trick is that salt corrosion occurs extremely slowly at the temperatures where we need road salt, so if you have a long prairie winter with very little time spent above zero, you can ignore it until spring. Then you just wash it well come springtime, and the CT might actually be better in that regard if it's smoother and there's less salt residue hidden in nooks and crannies that escapes the washing process.
I expect the bigger issue will be the weight of the thing; it's three tonnes and they had to make the tire pressure stupid high to bear the load. So it will have a much greater shear loading on its contact patches (easier to break free on ice) and somewhat worse flotation (sinks in deeper in snow).
@mitch when I was living in Philly I got the chance to see Streetlight Manifesto perform which was a real treat.
Klye
boosted
🇳🇱
At some point in the collective minds of people we stopped understanding the difference between attacking ideas, vs attacking the people who hold those ideas. People assume if you hate an idea someone holds by extension you hate the person. If you think an idea is idiotic then you must think people who hold the idea are idiots.
We need to get back to the place where people dont take personally when ideas are attacked.
I don't understand recipes that start off with
step 1: preheat oven
steps 2-5: make dough
step 6: chill dough overnight
and the actual baking starts around step 8 or 9.
Clearly I'm not gonna run the oven all night. Is this just to make a point about "read all directions before diving in"? A prank?
It gives the impression that nobody bothered to proofread the thing and makes it really hard for me to trust that it'll turn out well.
@sunflowerinrain is a state pension, in this context, a retirement benefit paid to former employees of the state? Certainly it's unintuitive that it should be counted as welfare if so; private sector retirement benefits are not generally thought of in that way.
@mitch I'd never heard that. Neat!
> - thanks for not addressing the no updates,
> - and the no freemo
So to make this abundantly clear:
- I **am** a QOTO mod
- I **am not** the QOTO sysadmin
- Removing spammers **is** a thing I do
- Upgrading QOTO's software **is not** a thing I do
- Adding things to our rules page **is not** a thing I do
- Conjuring up freemo **is not** a thing I do
Nothing you say will change any of the above, so there's no point in complaining further.
@freeschool I'm a mod. My primary contribution here is to keep our timeline free of spammers, and I've issued over three thousand bans to accounts on our server, so you don't have to see people hawking all sorts of rubbish every time you check the timeline. You're welcome. I don't have the authority to modify the QOTO terms - so I offered the help I could, which was advice on how to prevent your data from being scraped, if you want it that way.
> Did you know Google don't have to respect that option ?
Google doesn't have people going and reading the footers of websites to know whether they can scrape them. If you don't want your profile indexed, the way you communicate that to their bot is by setting the `noindex` tag, which is what the opt-out mechanism does. If you're interested in an actual effective solution, that's the way to go; if you're just interested in me making the "token gesture" on your behalf then the answer is no. Even if I had the authority, the text of your demand reads much like those email disclaimers (you know the ones: "This email is intended only for the person or entity to whom it is addressed...") which are generally regarded as ["legally useless"](https://www.economist.com/business/2011/04/07/spare-us-the-e-mail-yada-yada). So it strikes me as pointless visual clutter and I'm not in favour of including it.
> "Well-behaved" Google spider -
are you fucking having a laugh ????
Empirically, [it appears to respect your wishes](https://www.google.com/search?q=site%253Aqoto.org%252F%2540freeschool) if you communicate them in a way it can understand. And there's no need to curse at me.
> "we need to trust them"
I didn't say that, and don't put words in my mouth. Feel free to not trust them, and use the privacy settings (which should work against even ill-behaved bots). But why would you trust them to obey your demand just because it's in the footer rather than the page metadata?
> oh look "Canada's four university football conference championships"
We don't have any rule prohibiting casual discussion among members. In fact, if anything, the fact that you had to go back eight and a half months to find a non-STEM post on my profile should be taken as evidence *against* your argument. But our status as a STEM server is somewhat beside the point - which is, there are valid reasons why someone might want their profile indexed, just as there are valid reasons why you might not. The decision to check the box or not is up to you.
@freeschool Under Settings > Preferences, you'll see an option to opt-out of indexing. That adds an attribute to your profile which well-behaved crawler bots (Google search spider etc) will respect. As a STEM instance, we have plenty of researchers who use their QOTO accounts for professional purposes and *want* their work disseminated as widely as possible.
There are also privacy settings on a per-toot basis, which can prevent even badly-behaved scrapers from seeing your content. This is much more effective than expecting them to abide by the sort of demand you're advocating we post (in all likelihood, a human with control over the bot would never even read it).
@sabbatical Understandable! I suppose it would be possible to make something that *was* both - glass fibres embedded in acrylic. But that's not common to my knowledge - plexiglass doesn't usually have embedded glass fibres, and fibreglass usually uses a different plastic in which to embed them.
@Lana Kentucky tried something similar a while back, I think? They introduced a senior elective called "Biblical literacy" which sounded really objectionable from a separation-of-church-and-state standpoint, but about which I ended up feeling fairly ambivalent.
It was neither religious instruction nor a critical literature class - the idea behind it was that our culture is chock-full of references to the Bible, so educated adults ought to be able to recognize them, even if they don't believe the Bible is the word of God. For example, one should understand that "pieces of silver" carries connotations of betrayal, the same way they know that "Et tu, <name>?" does after they study Shakespeare.
@DaveyDov I think the digital overlay thing they do to put ads on the field dynamically was causing problems.
@peterdrake I think it'd look less weird - to me, the angle between the two rightmost "verticals" is too large for my brain to accept that they're parallel in 3D-space.
I don't know what an artist's advice would be, but from a geometry point of view:
- Fix a string at the vanishing point, and use it as a compass to make an arc near the centre of the page.
- Taking a compass, draw two overlapping circles, each with its centre on the arc.
- Lay your straightedge across the two points where these circles intersect, and draw a line along it.
The advantage to doing it this way is that once you've constructed the first arc, you can move the paper around as much as you'd like without worrying about keeping track of the vanishing point, because all the future work is relative to marks already on the page.
Of course you could come up with another way of constructing that first arc. If you have an angle θ cut out of something rigid or marked on something you can trace, then:
- place its vertex at the centre of the page with arms facing downward
- mark the points where its arms cross the edges of the page
- align the cardboard in any other orientation such that its arms still pass over the edge-marks
- mark the new position of its vertex.
The angle you'd need is related to the page width 𝓦 by θ = π - sin⁻¹[𝓦/(2ℓ₃)].
@peterdrake Nice! I extended the lines out further to see how you did. The blue lines, of course, are very good, the red ones have some variation, and the green ones are similar to the red but have worse outliers. If the extremes were improved a little bit I think it'd be quite good. The lower right corner is the only one I could tell looked wonky without the help of the extended lines.
@peterdrake I tried working through the trig to figure out where to place the third point. I assumed you could measure the distances ℓ₁ and ℓ₂ from the image centre to the existing vanishing points, and the perpendicular distance 𝓱 from the image centre to the horizon passing through both points.
The method I came up with requires you to first calculate 𝓭², which is the square of the distance from the observer to the image plane:
𝓭² = √[(ℓ₁² - 𝓱²)(ℓ₂² - 𝓱²)] - 𝓱²
Then you simply divide by the distance to the horizon to calculate the distance from the image centre to the third vanishing point:
ℓ₃ = 𝓭²/𝓱
I don't know how I could test this rigourously, but it gives sensible results at a couple key cases:
- In the correct two-point perspective case, the horizon passes through the image centre, so 𝓱 = 0. The first formula gives the formula 𝓭 = √[ℓ₁ℓ₂] for altitude of a triangle, and the second one blows up as the third vanishing point goes to infinity.
- In the correct one-point perspective case, the line connecting the vanishing point to the centre of the image is perpendicular to the horizon, so ℓ₁ = 𝓱 and ℓ₂ = ∞; consequently, the distance is indeterminate. This corresponds to an extra degree of freedom, as the observer can move directly toward or away from the vanishing point without changing its position on the image plane.
- If ℓ₁ = ℓ₂ = 2𝓱, then ℓ₁ = ℓ₂ = ℓ₃. This corresponds to a pseudo-isometric orientation; all the vanishing points lie at 120° intervals on a circle surrounding the image centre.
@peterdrake Yes, that's correct. It looks like uploading the image broke the animation, but imagine that it overlays another set of lines highlighting the dark square building along the right-hand edge, near the bottom (which is past the right-hand vanishing point, similar to the box in your drawing). The green lines corresponding to the 3D-vertical edges are nowhere near 2D-vertical, which is why the building doesn't look too distorted.
More broadly, imagine you're in the centre of an octahedron with its vertices at the cardinal directions (or whatever alignment corresponds to your drawing, if the boxes aren't oriented with their faces normal to NESW/UD). If the ray from your viewpoint through the centre of your image plane would intersect the octahedron at:
- a face, it's three-point perspective with the vanishing points at the three corners of the triangular face.
- an edge, it's two-point perspective with the vanishing points at the endpoints of the line segment defining the edge.
- a vertex, it's one-point perspective with the vanishing point at the vertex.
@peterdrake Here's an animation I just put together in GIMP from a decent quality photo, not a fisheye lens or anything. Note that each line in 3D space is parallel to the others of the same colour, but orthogonal to those of different colours. But in 2D space, all the lines of a particular colour converge to a single point - even the vertical ones.
@peterdrake I expect it'd look better - at that point everything ought to be lined up. Maybe try tracing that drawing onto another sheet, but offset vertically so it's like you describe? I'm trying to imagine it, and I think my brain is happier with the shape of the box when I picture it down near the bottom edge.
