timorl @timorl@qoto.org

Good news as EU formally adopts Ecodesign measures:

- As of 2021, all TVs, monitors, fridges, freezers, washing machines, washer-dryers, dishwashers and lighting products on the EU market will have to meet minimum repairability requirements
- Manufacturers will have to ensure easy disassembly with commonly available tools.
- Spare parts and repair information will have to be made available to professional repairers for a minimum number of years.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-49884827
https://www.coolproducts.eu/news/eu-to-pull-plug-on-wasteful-unrepairable-products

Floating-point rounding errors as an energy source: In one simulation, robots learned that small rounding errors in the math that calculated forces meant that they got a tiny bit of extra energy with motion. They learned to twitch rapidly, generating lots of free energy that they could harness. The programmer noticed the problem when the robots started swimming extraordinarily fast.

https://aiweirdness.com/post/172894792687/when-algorithms-surprise-us/amp?__twitter_impression=true

Just re-upping this offer: because being comfortable with git is a barrier to entry to many FS/OSS projects, and because I care deeply about lowering those barriers, I will tutor anyone who asks for help with git, and/or connect them with any mentor(s) they might prefer.

I'll do this while I put energy and work into making the tool more approachable, and into making better tools and learning paths.

Boosts gratefully appreciated.

#gittutors

#toyprogrammingchallenge

I want to propose a programming challenge. This could be fun for beginners and experienced programmers as well. It is language agnostic. It might even be more about community than the programming part itself. The challenge itself should not take more than an hour. But it shouldn't be so simple that you don't have to put in a little effort. I will propose the first one, and those who participate are welcome to propose the next and as we can agree on it we can go off and knock it out.

Once you see other people's results you can modify your own, or even propose something to make someone else's better or faster or fix a bug that you find.

These can become toy programs for you to have around for testing concepts, and helping to try out other languages.

If you are interested or know someone else who might want to play too share this with them.

I guess we can use this thread to get started, and I guess i am supposed to use a hashtag for something like this so how about #toyprogrammingchallenge

I will try to work in Python at least in the beginning but you are welcome to work in whatever you are comfortable with.

#toyprogrammingchallenge
First challenge:

"Ninety-nine bottles of beer on the wall"

Generate the whole song from "Ninety-nine" to "No". The output should look like :

Ninety-nine bottles of beer on the wall.
Ninety-nine bottles of beer. Take one down,
pass it around... Ninety-eight bottles of beer.

(You know what the middle looks like)

Two bottles of beer on the wall.
Two bottles of beer. Take one down,
pass it around... one bottle of beer.

One bottle of beer on the wall.
One bottle of beer. Take one down,
pass it around... No bottles of beer.

I won't put too many specifics on how you get there, but the output should be words, not numerals :) Try to write clean, maintainable and visually understandable code.

Let see if I am alone or anyone wants to play along. :)

Here is my first attempt total time 48 minutes.

https://git.qoto.org/Absinthe/ninety_nine_bottles

Great online book "Programming Language Foundations in #agda" written by the marvelous Phlip Wadler https://plfa.github.io/

#HongKong should make everyone realise how important Freedom is worth fighting for.
Look at the Hong Kong Youth, knowing they could be jailed for 10 years for so called "rioting", knowing that the PRC millitary could invade with/without the request of the HK government and slaughter them all.
That is why we shouldn't give up on basic rights just as Privacy, Freedom of Speech etc. because it is what matters the most.
#FreeHongKong

@snder
Yup We have a whole organizational structure of things going up around this. Cleverthis.com will be the parent company that mostly donates its profits into QOTO. Qoto will be the non-profit that will host all the various collaboration and hosting services for everyone. One component in that will be mastodon. But I want to make the other services (for example gitlab) unified under the same login. So it will appear as though it is one service.

I also have several other companies that will fall under cleverthis.com but that is unrelated to this conversation.

@inditoot

Of course basketballs are flat, Kinda obvious!