timorl @timorl@qoto.org

Hahaha, obczajcie film akcji na stronie głównej GNU: https://www.gnu.org/
10/10, klimat jak w "Szklanej pułłapce 4.0"

You know, if that law forbidding gatherings with the goals like “propagating homosexuality” actually passes in Poland, there’s only one good option: BE GAY, DO CRIME

(Reposted from Birdside, thread)

Today, the Polish parliament will read a proposed law that makes it illegal to "promote homosexuality", including - I am not exaggerating - pretty much ANY positive talk of LGBT+ people and their rights in public settings.

And foreign media seem almost entirely silent on this.

The law was drafted a while ago, but didn't get into the Parliament for procedural reasons.

It EXPLICITLY bans e.g.:

Kelber‘s Law: Wann immer es heisst „irgendwas Sinnvolles geht nicht, wegen Datenschutz“ liegt es NICHT am Datenschutz.

2016 jonny: "papers are cool, but what if they weren't static pdfs?"
2021 jonny: "need to clean up the build tooling of my paper so that when people PR contributions we can autodeploy to web and bioRxiv so the paper can embody a noncoercive decentralized governance system"

Happy World Standards Day, a day where the entire world celebrates international standardization... well, the entire world except the US, which celebrates this on October 22nd 😂

(I wish I was kidding)

UI thought: "friendly" date formats (e.g. "35 days ago" versus the absolute "2021-09-17") are not so friendly if the absolute-date form is not also readily available. Throw me a tooltip, please.

(Hit this today when cross-referencing absolute-date ticket comments to friendly-date GitHub PR actions.)

Exciting EU study on open source software:

> strongly contributes to GDP
> avoids vendor lock-in
> reduces costs & maintenance
> drives state-of-the-art tech
> fosters competition, interoperability & tech-neutrality

https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/library/study-about-impact-open-source-software-and-hardware-technological-independence-competitiveness-and

Wbrew obiegowej opinii, "EM", używane do oznaczenia prawa wyłączonego środka, nie oznacza "excluded middle", tylko "there Exists such a Magic box" xD
https://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/~mhe/HoTT-UF-in-Agda-Lecture-Notes/HoTT-UF-Agda.html#em

I think my family just got used to these things. Lol

How did spacecraft orient themselves using what was available in 1960s?

The obvious thing for things in Earth orbit is to find the Earth horizon and Sun; maybe find the direction the radio signals arrive from and/or their polarization.

If we are further from Earth, we need to figure it out before we can communicate, so the radio signals approaches don't work. Similarly, there's no horizon to speak of. Yet we managed to do it in 60s.

The first thing we can do is find Sun (simple: the brightest thing around) and Earth. How do we find Earth with no camera and no image processing? We know how far in angular distance we expect Earth to be from sun. So, we point an axis of our spacecraft at the sun and slowly rotate, while a photometer points at the correct angle off that axis. Once the photometer finds something bright enough (and not too bright), we stop the roll and keep tracking that bright thing, assuming it's Earth. We could (I don't know if that was ever done) instead use a radio receiver with an antenna that's angled in the same way.

What if the angular distance between Sun and Earth is too small (so that we wouldn't be able to get any sensible accuracy in the roll direction)? We do the same roll-and-observe-photometer trick to find Canopus, a very bright off-eclipctic star (it's in the southern hemisphere -- -50deg declination -- which is why e.g. I haven't ever knowingly seen it). It being off-eclipctic ensures that occlusions are rare, and it being _very_ bright makes it hard to confuse it with any other start (we discriminate by brightness and angular distance from the sun).

I knew about the concept of star trackers, but for a long time didn't know how they searched for the star. Picking the second brightest star (well, third) and constraining the sun-star angle is what I was missing.

Ref: https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/19750002096/downloads/19750002096.pdf (+ interesting details on how do we set up remote overrides for systems that are necessary for communication to happen using 60-70s technology

BTW This write-up ignores the questions of accuracy nearly completely; in part because I'm still confused how did the photoresistor-based sun trackers achieve an accuracy of a tenth of a degree (their fine alignment relied on driving the attitude so that two resistors' resistances were equal; I would expect their bias to creep due to some hard-to-predict differences in aging of different photoresistors, whether due to manufacting defects, or something as silly as different amounts of dust impacts, because the direction of motion wrt local dust was pointed in some slowly-changing direction wrt Sun and Canopus).

> In October 2018, Swedish ISPs were forced to block access to Sci-Hub after a court case brought by Elsevier; Bahnhof, a large Swedish ISP, in return soft-blocked the Elsevier website.

based

@humanetech

#Discourse also implementing #ActivityPub (joining the Fediverse) is great news! Thanks for sharing!

Here is a forum thread with more details on it. The linked post contains links to other related threads.

https://meta.discourse.org/t/federation-support-for-discourse/90921/7

.hg Happy Stanislav Petrov Day.

Math people either love or hate statistics.

What I have found that helps me is to think of the various theorems from the perspective of functions on spaces. Instead of the messy pseudo-math that intro courses present it as, there are underlying measure spaces. Past all the word salad, spaces are what is tossed around and modified to reason about reality.