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
ADSL works over wet string? Now, what about "ADSL over a UNPLUGGED phone line"? During a building-wide copper to fiber upgrade, the phone company stupidly unplugged my phone line from the distribution box. the phone was completely dead, no voltage. But my ADSL modem could complete the handshake. Speed degraded to ~128 Kbps, but I could still read basic webpages or chat on IRC... Apparently the parasitic capacitance on the line was enough for the AC signal to jump across the gap. My best guess was that only the ground wire was lost, and the parasitic capacitance of the modem's isolation transformer could complete the circuit via the mains powerline.
robryk
boosted
Looks like @coprolite9000 found the answer.
It's atmospheric chromatic dispersion.
https://cseligman.com/text/sky/atmosphericdispersion.htm
This makes sense:
1) regular chromatic aberration due to camera optiics would be the same color on both sides of the bright object, hence my surprise at this image
2) I didn't mention it, but the moon was only a couple of degrees above the horizon when I took this shot.
(In fact, it was bright orange but the auto light balance screwed up and I didn't color-correct before posting.)
robryk
boosted
In 1939, a new pregnancy test came on the scene which didn't involve the deaths of any small fluffy animals. This one involved injecting pee into Xenopus frogs (African clawed frogs). After a few days, if you were pregnant, the frog would lay eggs.
There is a colony of African clawed frogs still living in South Wales. This non-native population of frogs is thought to have originated from some ancestors escaping from a pregnancy testing lab in the 1960s.
robryk
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robryk
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A new road bridge got opened in December in a small town somewhere in Poland. For six months it was being used by regular traffic.
Elections are coming, though, so the Polish PM decided he needs to officially open it, with media present and all. And so, we get to behold this absolute gem — an announcement from the local municipality saying that:
> On May 18th, 2023, between 10:00 and 19:00, the bridge in [location] will be closed due to its opening.
Strong @scarfolk vibes.
robryk
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Sitting on a train delayed at Paddington. Waiting for the train manager. Who is on a train waiting outside Paddington for a free platform....
robryk
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Actual poll: overwhelming majorities support laws prohibiting discrimination against trans people.
WaPo headline and reporter's tweet: "Most Americans support anti-trans policies favored by GOP."
Just straight-up lying.
https://files.kff.org/attachment/Topline-KFF-Washington-Post-Trans-Survey.pdf
robryk
boosted
To the best of my knowledge there is no evidence on the internet of anyone having ever used a snake (the animal) to pull a cable through a conduit.
I'm not saying that anyone should fix that, but...
robryk
boosted
My new collection, SLEEP AND THE SOUL, is now available. You can get it as an eBook from most venues, or as print-on-demand from Amazon.
This collection includes the story “Solidity”, a current finalist in the Locus Awards for best novelette of 2022.
https://www.gregegan.net/BIBLIOGRAPHY/Ebooks.html#SleepAndTheSoul
How can one estimate comparisons of human heat loss across different scenarios?
According to, a.o. https://sci-hub.se/https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/4820331/, one can assume that a swimming person's skin temperature is between T_water and T_water+1degC. This seems to suggest that a swimming person at T_water=T will observe similar heat loss as a nude sweating person at T_wetbulb=T with significant relative wind. (Well, that's kinda reasonable even without that confirmation, and relies on similarly intuitive-but-uncited statement that the temperature of sweat film and skin under it will both be at not more than T_wetbulb+1degC, which is probably reasonable in the nontrivial wind assumption.)
Is there a rule of thumb how (thin) clothing should affect that? (I'm trying to figure out rough comparisons of heat loss between running and swimming.) I'm most curious about rules of thumb for (a) loose thin clothing (which I'd model as reducing wind speed and increasing humidity experienced by the film of sweat, but I can't guess by how much) (b) skintight hydrophilic clothing with high heat conductivity (which I'd model at first approximation as changing nothing from being nude).
Amusing (IMO poorly chosen) turn of phrase:
> So far, the declining power supply hasn’t impacted the mission’s science output, but to compensate for the loss, engineers have turned off heaters and other systems that are not essential to keeping the spacecraft _flying_.
-- https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/nasas-voyager-will-do-more-science-with-new-power-strategy
I wonder if no one noticed (IMO "keeping the spacecraft talking" would be more accurate and all around better; but I'm slightly discordian in that I want people to be confused in a way that teaches them), or people noticed and had a differing opinion.
#hair is elliptic in crosssection. Are the directions of the ellipse axes consistent for hairs that grow close to each other?
(https://sci-hub.se/https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1751616120307086 unsurprisingly find that bending strain-stress curves are different when bending along the short and long axis, so I wonder if this has anything to do with preferred hair bending direction)
robryk
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Some two and a half years ago, Google promised me a staff, so I went ahead and updated my title to Crypto Sorceress in our internal system, assuming my wand would come in the mail soon.
It seems to still be stuck somewhere, but now Google pointed out that I'm getting kinda old, and am really more of a senior staff person, so to reflect that I updated my internal title to Crypto Witch.
robryk
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@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
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
