Simon @spoltier@qoto.org

Mouth Biohacking

I'm not one to shy away from random things I find on the internet, so when I came across the Scott Alexander article on a discovery in the 80s about people who don't get cavities, my first thought was "how far is Honduras from Houston?" So on February 28th, my friend Rene and I became the 50th and 51st people to get our normal mouth bacteria scrubbed away and hopefully replaced by a genetically modified strain of…

https://ma.tt/2024/05/mouth-biohacking/

“Dream Scenario” fell flat for me on every level: comedy, metaphysics, metaphor, social satire — there wasn’t a trace of energy or inventiveness in the whole 90 minutes. I would have had a thousand times more fun rewatching “Nightmare on Elm Street” or “Being John Malkovich.”

@whitequark IEEE 754.00000000004

please tell me the most obscure joke you know

(feel free to explain or not explain it, depending on what you find more amusing to think of me reading it)

@ljrk @whitequark The. B in Benoit B. Mandelbrot stands for Benoit B. Mandelbrot

@whitequark@mastodon.social
Q: Why does a desktop computer eventually arc over and blow up after a few years of Web browsing?

A: Too much tracking.

@mcc I'll drop this here as they are doing a release: https://youtube.com/shorts/HbpNTqIXXQI

@whitequark actual wikipedia quote:

>According to a study by the Carnegie Institution for Science's Department of Global Energy, the annihilation of so many human beings and cities under Genghis Khan may have scrubbed as much as 700 million tonnes of carbon from the atmosphere by allowing forests to regrow on previously populated and cultivated land.

genghis you wholesome ecological king ☺️

software bloated, slow, full of bugs? time for a feature freeze. bring in the exterminators

"There’s a problem.

Science is slowing down. Sort of. There are nuances.

[...] it’s the job of the editors to make teaching more efficient by making knowledge easier to learn. They find the best metaphors, the most effective teaching methodologies, the right problem sets, and so on, so that the teachers can convey the same amount of knowledge in decreasing amounts of time."

affablyevil.substack.com/p/where-are-all-the-editors

#Teaching #Science #Blog

Sound: 13.7 billion years ago

Sound has its origin far back in time, not long after the disappointingly silent Big Bang. In fact, sound waves formed as soon as there was a medium for them, which was 300,000 years after the beginning of everything, and thirteen billion years before there was anyone to listen.”

Excerpt From: Mike Goldsmith. “Sound: A Very Short Introduction”

#kleefeldklangfeld

@trenner @Sevoris I actually think this dynamic and contrast is incredibly important and fascinating. To me there are multiple warring cultures and belief systems in software development; the beautiful belief that everyone can learn and that being technical is a craft and a process, vs the competitive contest culture belief that only some are born to code and are solo elite coders and they should get all authority no matter how they behave. I think there simply ARE these huge contrasts

Any sufficiently advanced systems thinking is indistinguishable from premature optimization

Disappointed to see The Markup share advice for people to use WhatsApp in its post about preparing your phone for a protest, and that it's coming from "digital security trainers."

Metadata literally kills, and WhatsApp is swimming in it. The metadata they collect includes:

Groups you're a member of, location, personal info (email, phone number, user IDs), contacts and their phone numbers, in-app search history, when you use the app & how often you use it. E2EE alone doesn't guarantee #privacy

If you were wondering, no, french journalists are still not on board adding in their threat model the french government as potential malicious actor targeting them for their work. They will prefer complaining that the law is not protecting them (and the whistle-blowers) well enough.

I'm tired.

in retrospect, this may have been an insane overkill amount of effort done just because I wanted to add this high-res mode

Unpacked one of the cat boxes and Tabby Loki is loose in Wellington, I don't even know if there's a TVA branch here!?

#Tusky 25.1 is out, the difficulty for making it crash at startup is now again set to medium (was erroneously set to easy in 25.0)

the problem with wizards starts with the pedagogy. first spells they ever learn are fireball and lightning bolt, of course they're liches before thirty

my teacher wouldn't show me any magic before I showed her I could have a disagreeable conversation without making any dangerous enemies. then the first spell I learned was "anti-osteoporosis," and here I still am

Has anyone used this package for analyzing well-trainedness of neural network weights? https://github.com/CalculatedContent/WeightWatcher