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
I think I've finally seen the light of the #SemanticWeb.
I think web browsers should give users a way to register apps to handle displaying certain #RDF schema types.
E.g. if I open an ActivityStream URL, the browser should load my preferred client in the same way that clicking a PDF in my filesystem will open up my PDF viewer.
Users would then be able to bring their own interfaces to data instead of relying on some closed source proprietary app interface.
Also opens the door to mixing data
robryk
boosted
If you need to solve 100% of a problem to get any benefit and the last 5% is impossible, *any* work on that problem is a waste of time. Figure that up front. Go work on something which actually can protect your users and systems and colleagues.
robryk
boosted
Because a friend found this useful yesterday:
Before tackling a problem, figure out whether it's the sort of problem where when you've solved 80% of the problem, you've solved 80% of the problem, or the kind where solving 80% means you've solved 0% of the problem.
This is especially important in security and privacy because that last 5% might be impossible.
robryk
boosted
I wonder if teaching children about non-transitive dice in primary school maths classes would be a fun way to prepare them for the fact that most non-trivial interactions in the world are at least as complicated, most “rankings” are meaningless, etc.
robryk
boosted
The Church Slavonic used two letters to denote nasal /o/ and nasal /e/ - the Big Yus (ѫ), and the Little Yus (ѧ). My uneducated guess is that the weirdly shaped symbol ѫ looked too much like a guy in a tie, so the Polish scribes went for more familiar A-like shape of ѧ when denoting a nasal /o/. The middle leg transformed into a small tail, and centuries later whoever is learning Polish will get rightfully confused by Ą being pronounced as /ɔ/.
robryk
boosted
Me trying to change my DNS configuration on not enough sleep and too much build infra work:
Jan 27 09:34:14 chaos named[360045]: /srv/dns/delroth.net.zone:58: unknown RR type 'CMAKE'
@rysiek I think this is similar-yet-distinct to your recent thread on various ML-based generators of something.
robryk
boosted
So I've been building a 100% analog polyphonic synthesizer with an unique twist. To use only vacuum tube era technology from the 1930s.
Over 300 neon gas diodes create the sound you hear. Pretty awesome for technology from 100 years ago.
Still a work-in-progress, but I wanted to post a video of it with the innards spread out across the workbench. : }
I call it the "Neon String Machine"
robryk
boosted
A DICOM image.
DICOM is the medical image format, very TIFF-like.
Its preamble makes many polyglots possible, including TIFF-DICOM sharing the same image data.
It doesn't tolerate appended data - but just append a "private" tag if needed.
The excluded middle appeal was granted! (https://efile.dcappeals.gov/public/caseView.do?csIID=63269)
I have no clue what the 2 year pause was about, why the appeal was granted as a result of the _appellee's_ motion to (seemingly) "get on with it" (i.e. why the appellant didn't care to file a similar motion way earlier), or when/under what case number the Superior Court will pick the case back up. The original case is marked as "closed" in the Superior Court.
At the same time: the lack of consequence in case numbers is grating (DC Superior Court uses spaces as separators, other courts replace them with dashes, and the DC Superior Court's lookup thingy doesn't understand those; the lookup thingy also deals in some broken way with parties with a middle name *and* the lookup thingy doesn't ever provide people with stable URLs for anything...).
robryk
boosted
@robryk I thought so, that's the first thing I tried, but apparently you can't LIMIT a DELETE with postgresql!
robryk
boosted
Another example: an identity team kept causing problems because they would conflate a user account and the actual human(s) using that account by calling them both "user".
After a week of me asking whether they were talking about user meaning "sack of meat" or "sack of bits", they did not have that problem any more.
I've just learned (yay @ collecting random data) that when my machine is thrashing (because I put firefox in a memory-limited cgroup, it sometimes runs out of memory, and it doesn't realize this has happened, because the _system_ is not out of memory yet) the _GPU_ gets very hot (85degC). Huh?
Do Swiss courts really consider multiple unrelated charges against one fellow at the same time?
> Dem Beschuldigten wird vorgeworfen, vom betagten Geschädigten im Laufe mehrerer Jahre unter wahrheitswidrigen Angaben mehrfach Darlehen in der Höhe von insgesamt mehreren hundert Tausend Franken erhältlich gemacht zu haben. Weiter wird dem Beschuldigten vorgeworfen, einen Einzahlungsbeleg der Post abgeändert zu haben, um die Zahlung eines höheren Betrags vorzutäuschen. Zudem wird dem Beschuldigten vorgeworfen, auf der Autobahn rechts überholt zu haben sowie während der Pandemie gegen die Schutzmassnahmen verstossen zu haben, indem er eine Party organisiert habe.
-- https://www.gerichte-zh.ch/verhandlungen/obergericht-zuerich.html
(Translated summary: The accused is accused of defrauding an elderly person, falsification of documents to further that fraud, overtaking on the right on the highway, and organising a party during the time it was forbidden by pandemic-related restrictions.)
(Or did that fellow make a very weird appeal that somehow was relevant to all of them? I can't see a way to do so other than sovcitry.)
robryk
boosted
The Furby source code is public and heavily commented. For example, it turns the microphone off when the motors are running.
https://archive.org/details/furby-source
People who know me IRL usually know that I have a very wide definition of "manipulative". In that context, I find it hard to form an opinion on https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/snnfmepzrwpAsAoDT/why-anima-international-suspended-the-campaign-to-end-live (tl;dr let's stop telling people not to mistreat fish, because that causes them to indirectly cause more fish suffering).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amundsen%E2%80%93Scott_South_Pole_Station
Things that my attention was drawn to:
The original site (for IGY) was built by a team led by a Lieutenant JG (one of the lowest officer ranks) of US Navy. That was a really interesting job (https://kb.osu.edu/bitstream/handle/1811/36750/Bowers_Transcript.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y) for the fellow.
The description of the base when it was mostly within a dome reminds me vividly of places I read about in interactive fiction. Such places seemed to me to be somewhat... unrealistic? (see e.g. the tower that was used for atmospheric observations "and later contained a music room"), but apparently my intuition was very wrong.
The new station is on *adjustable* stilts, so that it can be raised as the snow level rises (well, not really "rises", but as the ground sinks while more snow gets accumulated).
I was really amused by the juxtaposition of content and form of the troubleshooting section of the US Navy Cookbook: https://maritime.org/doc/cookbook1945/pg432.php
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
