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
@allenholub Seems to be for paid subscribers only.
R. A. Dehi
boosted
Can you spot the circles?
It took me a long time. Once you see them, they'll seem obvious.
This is the Coffer Illusion, by Anthony Norcia
@nomemory@fosstodon.org In my experience, math is mostly about admitting it when you're wrong.
R. A. Dehi
boosted
Apple has finally killed its ill-conceived plan to scan photos for CSAM. This is a direct result of work by experts and activists. Speaking up is important and sometimes we win.
https://www.wired.com/story/apple-photo-scanning-csam-communication-safety-messages/
R. A. Dehi
boosted
Here's my new essay for Crooked Timber, "Your platform is not an ecosystem."
It's a big essay and work in progress from me, and part of a broader project with Robin Berjon who greatly improved this draft and provided the best line in the piece.
What if we didn't just glaze over when people call their closed technical architecture an "ecosystem"?
And how would the internet look if we saw it as a real but damaged ecosystem that we can yet repair?
https://crookedtimber.org/2022/12/08/your-platform-is-not-an-ecosystem/
R. A. Dehi
boosted
Shared by my Daughter
"I need privacy, not because my actions are questionable, but because your judgement and intentions are"
In response to "if you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear"
Politics? Is this politics?
@adamshostack Well, I hope they have beds.
R. A. Dehi
boosted
So often, I'm reminded about the broken state of IT today. Barriers to entry everywhere are ridiculously high.
Self-hosting anything is incredibly stressful, often requiring you to be skilled as a system administrator to the point where you could make a living off of it.
I know why, of course.
Capitalism rewards enclosure. Money flows to companies who want customers on their terms, so solutions are designed to service thousands of people and for professionals to operate.
We need #SmallTech.
R. A. Dehi
boosted
Check this out -- major cities in North America replaced by major cities across the Atlantic at the same latitude
https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/d8tbs5/major_cities_and_towns_in_north_america_replaced/
R. A. Dehi
boosted
@alcinnz @calebjasik
SSB is unfortunately mired in innumerable *awful* design decisions that they refuse to fix. Most notably (but certainly not the worst) being that every implementation needs a byte-for-byte, bug-for-bug exact duplicate of the NodeJS JSON renderer and parser (*de facto* whichever version the main implementation happens to be targeting at the current time); with an added extension that key order must be identical every time it's parsed and re-rendered, including the order remaining stable when adding or removing keys.
R. A. Dehi
boosted
The mathematical audio recurrence specification fits on half a side of A4 paper, but implementing it in the style of C that can be optimized sufficiently for 68000 processor to run in real-time (unrolling loops by hand) takes about 300 lines.
I implemented a libsndfile wrapper for testing on Linux, found at least one bug that was causing strange artifacts (one "+" should have been a "-").
I worked a bit on a spectrum analyser using Haar wavelets, seems there's enough free CPU cycles to do it with 64 samples every 25fps, and display the results as a little bar graph.
I'm using my "self-centered random walk" technique to wiggle some parameters:
```
U := rand()
if U < x:
x := x - 1
elif U > x:
x := x + 1
```
R. A. Dehi
boosted
We (meaning Daniel McNab in this case) just deleted the GLSL pipeline from piet-gpu, meaning that the WGSL version is the one being developed. That means the end of piet-gpu-hal.
I have very complicated feelings about this. It is the right decision, but there was also a lot special about piet-gpu-hal. The world needs a lightweight, portable runtime for GPU compute.
I have a blog outline on this (https://github.com/raphlinus/raphlinus.github.io/issues/86) but not sure when I'll write it. These days, I'm prioritizing coding.
Magnesium Combustion System Design Log
@ACTupper Yes, the magnesium oxide will not have trouble resisting the heat of ordinary magnesium fire. m.p. 2852°
R. A. Dehi
boosted
Found a really nice #opamp to design my #UVC detector for my #bespoke #FPLC project. It has really low input bias current and offset #voltage. It's a bit slow with a slew rate of about 0.35v/us (would take about 14 #microseconds to rise from 0 to 5v) but, for my needs, this is perfect. Also found a better #UVC detector that has high sensitivity around 280nm. Time to draft a #transimpedence amplifier #circuit #PCB!
R. A. Dehi
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What happens when you use #autodiff and let your nonsmooth iterative algorithm goes to convergence?
With J. Bolte & E. Pauwels, we show that under a contraction assumption, the derivatives of the algorithm converge linearly!
Preprint: https://arxiv.org/abs/2206.00457
I will present this work this week at #NEURIPS2022
R. A. Dehi
boosted
I can’t with these essays on leaving Twitter—the digital paradise—that fully paper over *years of harassment* organized on the platform (gamergate, yourslip, countless other examples). the company finally addressed harassment several years back (because advertisers were complaining) and progressively tweaked measures but it was by no means flawless by 2022.
@_dm @raph @adamshostack @mattblaze There are a lot of things can do with NOMINATE-like statistics once you compute them; Adam's idea is one. Might prefer to count blocks or follows (or boosts, stars, etc.) by users who are similar to you, or to other users you trust (which could, sure, use some kind of flow computation or something)
R. A. Dehi
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#Markdown and #CommonMark are often used interchangeably. The latter refers to the formal specification published in 2014, resolving the syntax ambiguities of the original Markdown spec.
CommonMark and “#pandoc;s Markdown” differ in subtle ways, which is why pandoc has an extra CommonMark parser:
pandoc --from=commonmark
R. A. Dehi
boosted
In 1978, Klaus Steffen found a flexible polyhedron that doesn't cross itself! With 9 vertices, 21 edges, and 14 triangular faces, it is known to be the simplest possible non-crossing flexible polyhedron.
It's hard to understand Steffen's polyhedron by looking at it! In the image here, I believe the top face has been cut open so we can see what's going on underneath. For more details go here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steffen%27s_polyhedron
(4/n)
R. A. Dehi
boosted
plan9port (Plan9 from User Space) running on NetBSD/i386.
Pretty sleek and very lightweight!
Two screenshots of my 1024x768 display, appended horizontally.
#plan9 #netbsd #desktop #screenshotsaturday
I read a lot. Sometimes I learn things. I like making things. I think reading and doing are complementary.
Joined Nov 2022
