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
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robryk
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#2810 How to Coil a Cable
The ideal mix for maximum competitive cable-coiling energy is one A/V tech, one rock climber, one sailor, and one topologist.
https://xkcd.com/2810/
So, Swiss Post offers a "print and send a postcard with a photo of my choosing" service and gives everyone one such postcard free[1] per day. The canton of Zürich has an opt-out publicly readable mapping from license plate numbers to owners' names and addresses.
So, does anyone have some nice artwork for "please check your headlights", "thank you for being considerate", "please remember to use your turn signal", "please don't use a cell phone while driving", ...? :)
[1] well, ad-supported: they put an ad on the back next to the text
Weird request: if you have any ZVV paper tickets handy, could you say what "Art-Nr" is on them and what kind of ticket was it?
Amusing German word: https://de.wiktionary.org/wiki/kurzweilig
robryk
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@tqbf I'm sort of tired of the HN explanation that Google is doing stuff like that as a part of some secret agenda, though.
I call it an "asymmetry of nudges". One day, you dream up a way to improve security or make the platform cooler. If an unintended side effect of your proposal is that Google could lose revenue or market position... you just check yourself and don't go with it. If you try anyway, you will be arguing with execs for months or years. Even if you win, the effort to ship such features is high and the throughput is low.
The opposite is not true: if your feature could accidentally strengthen your company's position in some morally questionable way... the answer is just "we're the good guys, and it's not why we're doing this". If 3-5 years down the line, some PM in another org unit decides to use your feature precisely the way the critics feared - well, it's too late at that point.
So you get this gradual drift that is just an emergent property of the corporate culture. But if your only argument is "you have evil intentions" or "well, but your company could theoretically abuse it down the line", you're not gonna win too many debates.
robryk
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TIL about unzip-http, a successor to something I was trying to do with the dead httpfs:
https://github.com/saulpw/unzip-http
It let me get a single text file of metadata out of an *11 GB* zip file of data
Thanks @saulpw!
robryk
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Ich begreife weiterhin nicht, warum nicht in Praxen (ärztlich, Physiotherapie usw) flächendeckend #Luftfilter eingesetzt werden. Ein gutes Gerät, dass einen 40m2-Raum leise und zuverlässig reinigt, kostet in der Anschaffung 300€, im jährlichen Stromverbrauch bei 8h täglich Dauerbetrieb ca. 70€ + Wechselfilter 1x 50+60€ jährlich. Das würde ich mir doch (erst recht als absetzbare Ausgabe) schon zum Eigenschutz nicht nur vor Corona-Viren da hinstellen. Ich verstehe es einfach nicht. #CleanAir
robryk
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Company: We have a monolith!
Me: ...
Company: *holds up diagram of 8 services, 15 databases, and a home grown queue implementation*
Me: You fucked up a perfectly good distributed system is what you did. Look at that thing, it's got clock skew.
robryk
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robryk
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I knew geckos relied on van der Waals forces to cling to walls, and I assumed most insects and animals with similar abilities did them same.
But no ... ants wet their feet and use capillary adhesion.
Text article:
https://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2023-01-18/sticky-animals-ants-ceiling-geckos-walls-nature/101579912
Audio:
https://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/what-the-duck/what-the-duck!/14058326
mild spoilers for Greg Egan's fiction
It seems to me that your fiction used to be more hopeful about outcomes (e.g. Clockwork Rocket, Reasons to be Cheerful, or Bit Players had endings with mostly-universally-hopeful outcomes, esp. in comparison with e.g. Perihelion Summer, Solidity, or Light Up The Clouds). However, when I tried to see whether my impression is actually correct, I failed to confirm it (by trying to compare set of stories from older and newer compilations).
I wonder whether you think this impression has a basis in reality, and if so, whether this is an intentional change.
robryk
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#2797 Actual Progress
Slowly progressing from 'how do protons behave in relativistic collisions?' to 'what the heck are protons even doing when they're just sitting there?'
https://xkcd.com/2797/
robryk
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@robryk @ilja @rysiek
We probably need to face that there's no such thing like "almost-public posts".
The only thing we can achieve is preventing interaction below our post – at least on our own instance and on the ones of our followers, as we won't relay these replies to all our followers like done otherwise.
robryk
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YE9rEQAGpLw that's some very advanced and high effort shitpost-but-not-really. Building a fake real camera in Blender.
robryk
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I did it! I made an epicycle clock!
Check your loopy time here:
https://sophiehoulden.com/randomstuff/epitime/
@rysiek I grow really weary of the broken "following" state machine on fedi; something sometime caused me not to follow you anymore without any notification (and this is not even the real brokenness, where if things go out of sync on both ends _user intervention_ is required to get them back in sync).
robryk
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Reposting some tweets I wrote on June 26th, 2021 about Myst:
Technically, this script on the first card of the Myst stack that players get to interact with is a spoiler for the game's ending:
robryk
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Not logged in people are not allowed to search the code in a repository anymore.
Fuck you #Microsoft #GitHub
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
