Mark Tomczak @mtomczak@qoto.org

Digging in, fork and knife in hand, to an entire universe of problem-modeling I have never needed to deeply consider that has had decades of research put upon it in the form of #postgis .

I'm glad, a little less than halfway into my career by the standard retirement schedule, that there are problems I haven't touched at all. Keeps me young.

My favorite part of crimew's extraction of the no-fly list is that the list was extracted from test data. Because they were using live data as test data for a unit test.

Jesus, people. This is basic stuff. *Never* put real user data in your test pool. You *synthesize* that shit.

Criticize George Santos all you want, but I, for one, am glad we finally have *someone* in Congress who understands first-hand the dangers and wastefulness of an Agni Kai and can finally take steps to ban that barbaric ritual.

#frc

The meta this year is encouraging swerve drive, but it's a lot to ask of young teams to put eight motors on a robot.

Let me introduce you to synchro-drive (https://groups.csail.mit.edu/drl/courses/cs54-2001s/synchro.html). In its simplest configuration, two motors drive all the wheels on the robot: one turns them all synchronously and one spins them all synchronously. This is done using belts and your favorite flavor of right-angle gear chain.

It does have the one unusual property that while the drive train can drive in arbitrary directions, it can't turn the chassis. So for FIRST Robotics, one would have to couple it with a solution for swiveling whatever end-effector your robot has to finish the job. And slippage on the turn chain would be killer because there's no way mid-match to turn the wheels independently of each other. But if you can tolerate the challenge of keeping tension on your belts or chains, this can be way fewer motors than swerve.

Video of a synchro in action: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nurCA5Q4_hw

"""
Now family, I know you're worried about me and my time in the hospital. But fear not, for there is a god watching over me in my hour of need.

And that god is Crom, who wants me dead.

So I go now to battle for my right to draw one more breath in this ragged existence, to spite him who looks upon us with gloomy judgment.

Grieve not my fate, o kin! For I shall wrest my right to live from his dark grasp! And should I fail? Hah! Then I shall at last meet him face-to-face, and my fists will drag answers from his silent mouth!
"""

On tuning playable character design to get from the abstract concept to the fun of action.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7EpgjR-k3fE

"So I've got this act. I get a bunch of artists together, they make art. They publish it online in a ubiquitous communications platform that makes it trivial to see and copy their art, but the law says you can't **copy** it without some limitations so they figure they're fine.

So then a bunch a' eggheads, they come in, wave their dicks around, they build a machine that makes new art based on art someone made that gets fed into it. Then **they put that machine in front of the public.** The public puts all the artists outta work creating just the filthiest things imaginable, like they tell the machine to draw "George W. Bush fucking a bomb as the bomb is falling on Iraq, only Iraq is Saddam Hussein with a huge vagina." Just terrifying stuff. And now everyone hates the pictures and hates the eggheads and the artists hate the eggheads and the pictures and themselves and most of all, **everyone hates art.**"

"Well that's a hell of an act. So what do you call it?"

https://labs.openai.com/s/adcpxMnv9UfjVaI4SPEsjYPV?fbclid=IwAR0geEv0HFv_pU5UPLBtaPKsN_NFeKFv9rNJQo8hrkK-9Q5uIEy6WH3oTJI

Today I read where someone described the human condition of being the place where the falling angel meets the rising ape "Spicy qualities" and I can't stop thinking about it.

... my prediction is that we'll probably see some nodes converge around a common language / expectations of utility, and then outliers.

"Oh I like this one... it offers the Base Kit but also the Search Extension. Don't know how I feel about the AutoBan shared-list banning though."

An issue that will be both a positive and negative for #mastodon moving forward:

Mastodon is a protocol, not a single service. This means that what individual *nodes* do on that protocol differs based on the node you're on. Mine, for example, allows full-text comment searches and following topics by regex, not just hashtag.

This will be a pro because the ability to build different features atop the protocol will encourage development and diversity. Never care about spoiler tags? This node lets you disable them. This node lets you regex for which ones you auto-show and which ones stay hidden. This node lets you specify trusted users where spoiler-tags are auto-shown, etc. Let a thousand flowers bloom.

This will be a con because users actually hate complexity and it takes a particular mindset to be excited about the answer to a simple question of "Does Mastodon support X" being "It depends."

#frc

"A good idea is something that does not solve just one single problem, but rather can solve multiple problems at once."

~Shigeru Miyamoto

🎵 I heard there was a secret code
That triggered buffer overload
But you don't ever install updates do you?

It goes like this: close comment, then
Twelve thousand cat emojis, send:
Some hacker jerk exposing
How to root you...🎶