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
robryk
boosted
@cstross Oh me neither. I just thought it was kind of badass that a particular generation of teens internalized what was basically morse code.
robryk
boosted
pointer: 466F6E74
suspicious. never trust a pointer with only 4x-7x values.
cause that's not a pointer. That's a string saying "Font"
ISTM that there are >=two usecases for user-to-user blocks here:
- "I don't want that fellow to see anything I'm posting",
- "I don't want that fellow to respond in threads I start/I contribute to/...".
They seem to be a poor fit for the latter (they don't actually prevent anything in that regard, if not for any other reason than that the "I contribute to" variant implies conflicts over control of who can post to a thread), and work mostly by making it harder for the blocked fellow to find such threads and by unreliably refusing to make such replies visible to public at large.
Having a concept of thread and a concept of the thread owner seems to be something that would be a much better solution for the second usecase. Currently, there's some amount of ownership already present, mostly vested in the admins of participants' instances (they can omit posts from replies collections published by their instances, which will sometimes prevent them from being seen in that thread). However, none of that control is reliable. I think we're living in the strictly-worse compromise between "anyone can reply to any post and everyone who looks at the thread sees that reply (viewer's local blocks permitting)" and "every thread's initial poster can moderate the thread (for some value of moderate)".
I wonder whether we could build something with advisory moderation performed by the thread initiator: have them publish messages about their wishes wrt replies in that thread, and give clients an option to obey that.
NB: I think I've understood an actual reason why people dislike that others don't block their blockees: If A blocked B, B replied to A (as in, disseminated such a reply), then instances that do not block A will see and show that reply to all their users and to people who visit their web UI. (@timorl who might find this potential reason interesting)
robryk
boosted
It's that time of the year again when I keep the Zürich falcons webcams on my second monitor... they've come back to the nest a few days ago so I guess they should lay eggs pretty soon?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MbV-hopuoJY & https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fqDJ00vsf5Y
"Social terraforming" is a weird way to look at a situation
robryk
boosted
@ct_bergstrom Maybe LLMs should be viewed as enthusiastic improv players? Whatever random crap you suggest, they're like "Yeah, sure! I can go along with that! That sounds fun!"
In some sense, that's another way of "producing the most likely output".
robryk
boosted
@molly0xfff: Funny thing about this claim is that I keep around a link to a rather more credible study on the energy consumption of streamed video: https://www.iea.org/commentaries/the-carbon-footprint-of-streaming-video-fact-checking-the-headlines
Doesn't really match up with what they're claiming.
I am visiting my parents for Easter. Before going, I did check that my weird setup for providing disk encryption key to my desktop without anyone physically present works. What I did not verify was whether any of the ssh keys I've taken with me are included in authorized_keys on the desktop ^^*
Hm~ I have a somewhat interesting comment for you, which immediately brings up a fiction recommendation in my mind, which is IMO much more interesting than the comment. Sadly, the comment coupled with the recommendation is a significant spoiler, so let me just give you the latter: "Steerswoman" seried by Rosemary Kirstein (warning: unfinished series, but the author's alive) is a fantasy-or-sf series that follows some people who value curiosity very highly. A random review that I think describes the books well: https://escapepod.org/2011/11/19/book-review-the-steerswoman-by-rosemary-kirstein/
Haven't found an answer I'd be satisfied with. The simplest way I know of right now is picking a random high density parity code (with the downside of the necessity for randomness in the code's construction and high but still polynomial time complexity of decoding).
The standard erasure codes (polynomial ones) require that the field size (so alphabet size) is larger than the number of symbols in the codeword. Clearly we can have arbitrarily-close-to-ideal erasure codes even for smaller alphabet sizes (because noisy coding theorem). Are there some that can be easily described?
It seems to me that a "reverse plotter" that measures its distance to fixed points (via string length) as well as orientation (not sure which approach would be easiest here) and displays the appropriate part of a drawing would be helpful for drawing patterns on cloth, and would be a very compact device (e.g. in comparison to a drafting table, or even just the parallelogram angle transfer thingy from a drafting table). Do people make them?
Manual plotter for drawing clothing patterns (string with distance graduations, passed through holes in fixed LEGO bricks).
robryk
boosted
@delroth That sounds a bit like the challenge from Underhanded C Contest 2008 (http://www.underhanded-c.org/_page_id_17.html):
> write a short, simple C program that redacts (blocks out) rectangles in an image.
> The challenge: write the code so that the redacted data is not really gone.
robryk
boosted
how it feels to talk about #activitypub and how #fedi implements it
robryk
boosted
we're getting to the point that the contradictions and shortcomings are starting to become more apparent...
- things like moderated conversations are impossible if you don't actually have a concept of a "conversation".
- there's so many different ways to do "groups" that it's a running joke at this point, because everyone has a different idea of what a "group" is. it's the "blind men feeling an elephant" problem.
- things like forums and subforums, chat rooms, etc are not easily possible rn.
Surprisingly (for general competence level of authorities in managing typical situations) nonsensical traffic sign combination.
robryk
boosted
Going to just walk around the Computer History Museum in Mountain View carrying my teapot until security tackle me for stealing the historic artifact
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
