R. A. Dehi @radehi@qoto.org
I read a lot. Sometimes I learn things. I like making things. I think reading and doing are complementary.
Joined Nov 2022
R. A. Dehi
boosted
I was giving a computing ethics lecture about #FOSS and #antifeatures around 2014. Lots of folks there had never even heard of #FDroid. Maybe it's still not well-known?
F-Droid is a repository and platform for FOSS on Android. Their app can manage your other apps, much like you do with the Google Play Store.
When I need an Android app for something, I always check F-Droid first, just because the apps are trustworthy.
I'll reply with a few of my favorite apps on F-Droid... 🧵
R. A. Dehi
boosted
Greetings. I'm an armchair student of history (not just tech history), but given that I've been involved in the development of the Internet continuously since the early DOD ARPANET days (so, technically before there *was* an Internet) I'm watching the Twitter->Mastodon migration (and the nightmarish, shameful disintegration of Twitter itself) with considerable interest indeed. There is no historical precedent that I know of, and what's happening is even more remarkable given that it has been precipitated by a single chaotic individual in a matter of weeks.
The high speed with which I see social graphs rebuilding here is fascinating, and we can be sure that there are a bunch of PhD theses and books in the future that will attempt to explain all of this for future generations.
Sometimes when you're living through significant historical events it's not obvious except in retrospect, often many years later. What we're living through now with Twitter is clearly significant history, from technology, business, social, and other standpoints.
And even if Mastodon turns out ultimately to be a steppingstone on the way to other social media models able to scale far upward more easily, it is playing a crucial role now in providing a "lifeboat" for Twitter users who are unable to stomach what is happening to that firm with every passing day.
For all its many faults over the many years, we built the Internet to be resilient. And what we are seeing today is that not only has the technology met that goal from ARPANET onward, but thanks to the Internet's vast numbers of dedicated and caring users, even a monstrous train wreck like Elon's Twitter can't bring it (or us!) down.
Thank you all! -L
@lauren I haven't seen anything to contradict that point of view except the initial promises.
@bitsavers Hmm, I guess that kind of makes sense.
@lauren Seems to be about 2:1 in favor right now. I'm interested to hear how this interacts with the Twitter moderation policy council decisions.
@bitsavers I've never understood why people programmed in RPG. What's the appeal?
R. A. Dehi
boosted
Turns out you can skip the distance estimate (hard calculations) by considering axis-aligned bounding boxes with a long case analysis of possible box positions (e.g. if all corners are in the cardioid, check if the box crosses the axis and if the right edge of the box is the to the right of the cusp).
There are some irrational coordinates, but nicely you can just square both sides to get a dyadic rational that can be compared exactly.
And you can apply perturbation theory to the implicit cardioid test, provided you have enough precision in the low precision type (24 bits (float) is not enough, 53 (double) seemed ok in one brief shader test, I'm using 64). This increases the cost of the test, so it's good to be able to skip these for the whole view via AABB checks.
If using fixed point (instead of floating point) for high precision reference, you need 4x the fraction bits for intermediate calculations to avoid underflow / truncation error.
Symptoms of the problems were false positives (leading to bad images with too much interior) near the cusp, and some false negatives near the cusp too (correct image but takes longer than necessary).
@mathowie The bigger issue is that you're being manipulated into hating each other for the benefit of those who profit from factional conflict. You're careening headlong into a civil war.
Last year you shot each other to death 20,000 times. When the war starts, twenty million of you will die within two years. It'll be like 1000 years of "Homicide: Life on the Street" compressed into two years. Even if you don't die in the fighting, you'll suffer innumerable losses of freedom, opportunity, and peace of mind.
That's a much bigger risk to you personally than some jerkoff going postal at the supermarket. Right now mass shootings only serve to manipulate you into hating.
@mathowie I don't think that's a realistic fear. You're much more likely to be killed on the road driving by a traffic accident or at church by obesity. How many people do you know who were killed by gun violence? Compared to, say, suicide, heart disease, or cancer.
I also don't think is a realistic causal model, because people have been killing each other much longer than they've had guns. In fact, in most of America, we have less guns than you have in the US, as well as more restrictions on guns, but we kill each other more.
@lauren @mattblaze Sure, but I think Twitter was more important than 4chan, 8chan, Kiwi Farms, Zerohedge, Infowars, and YouTube put together; most of those platforms relied on Twitter for recruiting and for meme propagation. Twitter excels at getting people riled up for mob violence in a way that no other medium ever has. President Trump could never have existed without it.
So, what will the future look like for it?
@lauren @mattblaze Well, at least Space Karen has fired most of the people who built the Twitter that crushed your democracy. Maybe it will get better instead of worse. For example, by not existing.
@lavenderlens @BE Yeah, it's possible to get hot water from vacuum tubes on cold sunny days, but then you need systems to circulate the water.
Big business has its role; we're technologically a long way away from being able to economically make artisanal PV panels from locally-sourced minerals. Is theoretically feasible, but we don't know how to do it.
@mattblaze @lauren It already crushed your democracy; Twitter elected a reality TV star president of the US. Also it revived neo-Nazism. How much worse can it get?
@lauren Apparently they have a quarter billion daily active users. If goes failwhale for a week, how many will be left when they get it working again?
@mathowie I think US and European societies have been pervasively gun-centered since the 16th century; is not just a question of one year. Since the first nuclear war almost 80 years ago, guns have become a little less central to states, but states (based on guns) have at the same time become more central to society.
@mattblaze Probably a lot of them will start their own startups.
@BE @lavenderlens Yeah, I wonder how is all going to result. Utility-scale PV is scaling way up and tends to kill a lot less people than rooftop PV, but I think lots of people are still getting rooftop worldwide. The big trend is that new wind and solar generation is being installed faster than fossil-fuel generation, and that's what we need. But the panel price has been stalled at just below grid parity for years now.
@louis@emacs.ch You mean as a compilation target? Wasm.
R. A. Dehi
boosted
excellent mastodon features you'll quickly wonder how you lived without: temporary mutes
on the web interface, hit the three-dots menu on a post, then "mute <whoever>" and you can select a TIME PERIOD to mute them for!
friend posting about a tv show you haven't seen? mute 'em for an hour
someone clogging your local feed with current events you don't care for? mute 'em for a week
lucky won't stop talking? mute 'em indefinitely
it just works
@lxo I haven't actually used it but my understanding is that with WSL1 they implemented the Linux system call interface in the NT kernel, but with WSL2 are running Ubuntu in a VM
I read a lot. Sometimes I learn things. I like making things. I think reading and doing are complementary.
Joined Nov 2022
