robryk @robryk@qoto.org
I enjoy things around information theory (and data compression), complexity theory (and cryptography), read hard scifi, currently work on weird ML (we'll see how it goes), am somewhat literal minded and have approximate knowledge of random things. I like when statements have truth values, and when things can be described simply (which is not exactly the same as shortly) and yet have interesting properties.
I live in the largest city of Switzerland (and yet have cow and sheep pastures and a swimmable lake within a few hundred meters of my place :)). I speak Polish, English, German, and can understand simple Swiss German and French.
If in doubt, please err on the side of being direct with me. I very much appreciate when people tell me that I'm being inaccurate. I think that satisfying people's curiosity is the most important thing I could be doing (and usually enjoy doing it). I am normally terse in my writing and would appreciate requests to verbosify.
I appreciate it if my grammar or style is corrected (in any of the languages I use here).
Joined Nov 2020
Hm~ is it about those salts decomposing into something else in solution at high temperature?
Why do PWR reactors use boric acid, as opposed to some random salt of boron? Apparently boron salts are often well soluble, from the nuclear POV we only care about boron being present, and I'd expect salts to cause fewer chemical problems due to their closer-to-neutral pH. In fact some random papers (https://inis.iaea.org/collection/NCLCollectionStore/_Public/28/034/28034575.pdf) describe tradeoffs involved in maintaining pH as boric acid concentration changes.
There clearly must be some reason why boric acid is preferred over any simple boron salt. What is it?
Can you expand on what you mean by boring? When I was a preteen I could find random websites with lots of circuit diagrams for simple things someone found useful, Seaview fanfiction, and various very esoteric topics. My impression is that finding as satisfyingly in-depth descriptions, especially of niche topics, is now harder.
Jeśli dobrze rozumiem https://www.gov.uk/apply-for-photo-id-voter-authority-certificate to można dostać dokument który działa znając tylko czyjś "National Insurance Number". Czy jest to z jakiegoś powodu trudniejsze do oszukania niż wersja w której komisji możnaby podać ten numer?
If you are still curious about the mechanism of the weirdness: Can you tell how? (Did it get pushed to it? Did it fetch it? From A or from C?)
My very wild hypothesis is that for some reason B doesn't consider these messages (I forgot Matrix's term for nodes-in-the-room-history-dag) valid. Perhaps A changed its mind about its signing key? But I don't know why B haven't fetched them from C, trusting them because C considers them valid. I will need to reread how validity determination works, but now I need to sleep, so it has to wait until tomorrow. (I realized I don't get how you can at the same time prevent C from potentially impersonating A's users and at the same time accept nodes from C that mention a node from A that appears invalid as a parent.)
I wonder what happens if A keeps changing its mind about what its signing keys are.
How do you know that it didn't get federated directly from A to C? (Even if it did, it would still be a very weird failure mode.)
Huh, I'm very surprised that you find this line odd (I don't think I've seen this opinion in the past). I would appreciate if you answered a question or two so that I can understand it better (but do understand if you don't wish to).
The reason I find this line very natural is that I think in terms of which node is intended to be able to speak for which entities, especially that those entities are named in a way to remind us of that relation (domain in URLs, domain/instance part of a fedi ID). Do you think that it makes more sense to keep track of a more vague trust (as in, "that node is rather trustworthy") in general, that the mapping between nodes and entities is insufficiently natural, or something else I can't easily see?
sundog's hot take on fedihugging
A potential issue is that it might be unclear who was nefarious: the originating instance or the server whose page we're previewing. I don't think it's very significant though (compared to e.g. the amount of shady and somewhat-hard-to-assign-blame-for stuff one can do with versions of a toot and sending them selectively to instances).
I see another potential usecase: telling the user that they need to raise the volume if they hear nothing, because someone is probably trying to speak to them now. I usually set my call volume to minimum reasonable for the place I'm in and then when I call someone from a totally different location I somewhat nervously await the ringing tone so that I can adjust the volume (and when the ringing tone is late I run the whole "look at the screen to see what the problem is" dance).
In the sense that someone other than your client, your own instance (both of which you kind of need to trust anyway), and the actual site that's linked to (who's the source of the content, so the preview must trust it) can manipulate it.
The site showing different contents to different users is another issue that I agree exists and can cause similar problems _for malicious linked-to sites_. For nonmalicious ones consider e.g. a post expressing outrage at something bbc published with a link to the "article" on bbc with a helpful "preview".
Out of curiosity, what's the potential harm? (Is it ~biological or ~chemical?)
@timorl Uh... it does nothing? (I assume it's supposed to rotate stuff.) My browser's firefox, the extensions that seem potentially relevant are ublock origin and zotero connector. Nothing in the JS console, except for godot's welcome message, some complaints about audio mix rates, and a complaint about long-running stuff in a context that blocks rendering.
Oscilloscopes from the 80s, even DSOs, are in at most tens of thousands of components range (most of it in SRAM). Mine, apart from discrete components, has 74-series TTL logic chips, some opamp-like ICs, and 8kB (or 16?) of SRAM.
@timorl 4? The one where you have to avoid mixing in black
I don't get what the white pipe is.
I enjoy things around information theory (and data compression), complexity theory (and cryptography), read hard scifi, currently work on weird ML (we'll see how it goes), am somewhat literal minded and have approximate knowledge of random things. I like when statements have truth values, and when things can be described simply (which is not exactly the same as shortly) and yet have interesting properties.
I live in the largest city of Switzerland (and yet have cow and sheep pastures and a swimmable lake within a few hundred meters of my place :)). I speak Polish, English, German, and can understand simple Swiss German and French.
If in doubt, please err on the side of being direct with me. I very much appreciate when people tell me that I'm being inaccurate. I think that satisfying people's curiosity is the most important thing I could be doing (and usually enjoy doing it). I am normally terse in my writing and would appreciate requests to verbosify.
I appreciate it if my grammar or style is corrected (in any of the languages I use here).
Joined Nov 2020
