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
Ignoring any correlations between general health and weight, I would naively think that #cancer risk would be proportional to weight (or rather, weight of the tissue in question): the chance of creating a mutation that is effective at creating a malignancy should be roughly constant per cell per unit of time, so the total rate of that happening should scale with number of cells.
Is there an obvious reason why this scaling is wrong, or is it not observable due to the health-weight correlation? (I've spent a few minutes trying to look it up, but found a mountain of experimental results correlating BMI with cancer risk only.)
Today in people are nice:
I saw a small corvid that was sitting suspiciously motionlessly on a kerb. I was running for a short distance, so didn't even have a phone with me. Before I could think of whether I should go back for my phone and a box (and hope the bird didn't hide) or ring a random doorbell a woman with a cardboard box appeared.
Or maybe I'm wrong, Leidenfrost causes it not to violently boil, and the colling is fast enough for their purposes?
The most recent #Sachgeschichte (about chains) claims that the cooling bath for hardening is water (it's surely oil: water would visibly boil and Leidenfrost effect would make cooling insufficient).
I've used WDR's contact form to tell them that and we'll see what happens.
robryk
boosted
....his daughter, almost in exasperation, says to me "PLEASE, just talk to him about how this works, you know this kind of stuff!"
He gave me a tour of the large battery system connected to the solar panels on his roof, he was very proud of all of it, and then the very elderly gent I'd come to check on in a power cut offered to make me a cup of tea...very, very smugly. And too right, it was hilarious 😎
robryk
boosted
Yesterday morning: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1EJZLrkHGMU (Cambridge Bike Bus + Band, me with a photographer sitting backwards on my longtail). The ride was slow and nearly technical, given the low speed, load, kids to not hit, and the parked cars that I managed not to scratch.
Apologies if it comes with advertising, I'm over my weekly upload quota at Vimeo so that will happen next week if I remember.
(I was very surprised by the requirement and pharmacist was very surprised by my surprise, so I think they were unaware of this exception applying as opposed to not willing to apply it.)
Swiss law on prescriptions is *weird*.
There are categories of medicines (Abgabekategorien) with a clear demarcation between requiring a prescription (A-B) and not (D-E). Notably category C is missing, because it was eliminated in 2019 (it used to be "can be sold in pharmacies only but without prescription" IIUC). Some of the stuff from C went to D, some of it to B.
That would be clear. However, "this medicine was once in C" is an exception to the requirement for prescriptions for medicines in B! (See https://www.fedlex.admin.ch/eli/cc/2018/588/de#art_45) Thus, we effectively still have C, but it's way more confusing.
This story was brought to you by a pharmacy wanting a prescription for KCl from me. (Which I'm really amused ended up in B, given that it has a similar safety profile to table salt afaik: you can overdose on it, it can have bad interactions with your other medications or diseases, it's kinda hard to overdose without really trying.)
robryk
boosted
In the process of debugging a NUMA first-touch problem, I accidentally found my simulation becomes significantly faster when it's running on garbage data without memset() - even on non-NUMA systems... What?! Does the kernel provide a fast-path for uninitialized memory that I've never heard of?
"a read from a never-written anonymous page will get every page copy-on-write mapped to the same physical page of zeros, so you can get TLB misses but L1d cache hits when reading it."
Yes... #hpcTIL that a traffic warden standing with your back or front to you does not necessarily mean "stop" in Switzerland: https://www.fedlex.admin.ch/eli/cc/1979/1961_1961_1961/de#chap_7
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?
Ah, PSA: if you do actually collide with a bat, check very thoroughly whether (a) you got scratched in any way (b) you got your face in contact with the bat. If either happened, wash the scratch/your face thoroughly and urgently visit a doctor due to the risk of rabies.
I think I nearly collided with a bat today. I was riding a bike along Sihl just north of Sihlcity (the path is between a small forested hill and a river with a highway overpass over it; it's sparsely lit with streetlamps) and saw (~single frame only, because of timing wrt my blinking) a dark concave-sided diamond shape in front of me and felt a gust of wind.
It's not that surprising, given that a bit further north friends of mine would semi-regularly notice bats over the rive (and I did once or twice), but the near collision is surprising given my very predictable motion.
robryk
boosted
“How do you accidentally run for President of Iceland? | by Anna Andersen”
Glad somebody wrote about this because it’s an objectively hilarious UX case study
(And they just announced that eleven people managed to get the requisite number of endorsements in time) https://uxdesign.cc/how-do-you-accidentally-run-for-president-of-iceland-0d71a4785a1e
robryk
boosted
So ...let's face it. A LOT of folks in tech circles are somewhat amazed a fully #blind person can even find the power button on a computer, let alone operate it professionally. I am such a person, and I'd like to bust that myth.
It's also true that many #hacking tools, platforms, courses etc. could use some help in the #accessibility department. It's a neverending vicious circle.
Enter my new twitch channel, IC_null. On this channel, I will be streaming #programming and #hacking content including THM, HTB and who knows what else, from the perspective of a #screenReader user.
What I need, is an audience. If this is something you reckon you or anybody you know might be interested in, drop the channel a follow or share this post. Gimme that #infoSec Mastodon sense of comradery and help me out to make this idea an actual thing :) https://twitch.tv/ic_null #tryHackMe #streamer #selfPromo
Eh, why does the most recent #Sachgeschichte consequently use value and cost interchangeably~~~
Putting "https://mas.to/@TechConnectify/112328384373243115" in qoto's searchbar results in an error toast saying "500". When I look at network requests involved, I see a request to "https://qoto.org/api/v2/search?q=https:%2F%2Fmas.to%2F%40TechConnectify%2F112328384373243115&resolve=true&limit=5" returning an error page with status code 500.
But also, the volume of the sound I was hearing wasn't that high, so either I failed to notice the same effect when I was hearing louder lowish frequency sounds, or this is more pronounced because eyes are "closer" to teeth than ears.
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
