R. A. Dehi @radehi@qoto.org

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.

@fdroidorg

I'll reply with a few of my favorite apps on F-Droid... 🧵

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

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).

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

Perspectives.

Hello new #API developers who've come here from Twitter.
I've written some guides to help you get started with the #MastdonAPI

Includes how to build #bots, grab conversations, and use search effectively.

Read them at: https://shkspr.mobi/blog/tag/mastodon/

#Underline text in different lightweight markup languages:

Emacs #OrgMode , Muse:
_this_

#DokuWiki:
__this__

#Textile, #Jira
+this+

There is no Markdown syntax for underlined text, but #pandoc's #Markdown reader treats the content of spans with class "underline" or "ul" as #underlined:

[important]{.underline}
[nota bene]{.ul}

I've been using #AnnotatedEquations in my recent papers. I think it really adds to the readability and understanding of the math.

Here are some examples. It uses #tikz in #latex.

Let me know if you like it. Happy for any feedback.

One of my pals told me my Twitter comments were as viscous as AOC and Nancy Pelosi. I though everyone’s were like that! I just got used to it. As much as you can. It’s nothing short of astounding to me that I can just post and engage on here and people respond in a way that seems normal and real. The Twitter comments world is distorted and dangerous. I don’t see how twitter can be fixed. We’re better off here. ❤️

Sad news from UNC Chapel Hill Computer Science — Fred P. Brooks, the founder and long-time chair of the department (and a major influence on my professional outlook) passed away a few hours ago.

@alcinnz Well, so, the effect of any finite-length string on a particular DFA is a finite map from possible states at the beginning of the string to resulting states at the end of the string. For the empty string it is the identity function.

You can compute the effect of a concatenation of strings by composing these maps. If you do this bottom-up on a long string, starting from all its one-character substrings and then consolidating them into a tree of substrings of length 2, 4, 8, etc., each exhaustively covering the original string, you have a log-time parallel algorithm for DFA evaluation on the string. The final step is to apply the finite map computed for the entire string to the initial state defined by the DFA.

Then, if desired, you can propagate the results back down the tree to find the state of the DFA at every character.

Is precisely the parallel prefix-sum algorithm, with the monoid operation being function composition rather than, for example, integer addition.

Does that make sense? I don't know how to evaluate the clarity of my explanation in part because I don't know how familiar you are with the background.

"The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, but wiser people are so full of doubt." – Bertrand Russell, paraphrased from The Triumph of Stupidity”, Mortals and Others: Bertrand Russell's American Essays, 1931-1935

https://twitter.com/MNateShyamalan/status/1592287177542696963

#quote, #quotes, #stupidity, #doubt, #impostorsyndrome

Switched out Serial for PPP and ... we can now also use all the on device internet tools like it's 1999. Can telnet to the host with Hermes, so nothing lost.

It's broken. Nothing works. Everything wants https and 50MB downloads.

However this all works the way I want it now. Another revision of the lid and I'll print the final version.

#Psion #Sidecar #BringBackTheOldWeb

This one is for all the new people on #Mastodon: did you know that the #fediverse has more than just a microblogging replacement? And that they can all interoperate with your Mastodon account?

Check them out!

Facebook replacement: Friendica
Instagram replacement: Pixelfed
YouTube replacement: PeerTube
Spotify replacement: Funkwhale
MeetUp replacement: Mobilizon
Reddit replacement: Lemmy
Podcasting replacement: Castopod
GoodReads replacement: BookWyrm

@radehi being at peace, now there's a skill worth having