timorl @timorl@qoto.org

👾 people who want the extinction of humanity are cowards and reactionaries

we’ve fucked up this planet real good, it’s indisputable, even if we immediately and permanently stopped producing CO2 yesterday there will still be a mass extinction. just dying now would be equivalent to setting a house on fire and walking away without so much as trying to find a bucket of fucking water.

we have a responsibility to solve this. if we want to avert a mass extinction–and there is no good reason we should not want that–we have to get a lot of CO2 out of Earth’s atmosphere. we’re smart, we can do that, we can solve that puzzle, we’ve done amazing, impossible things before. it’s going to require technology, it’s going to require producing energy (we still have to immediately stop producing C02 as fast as possible that is also indisputable, but we are going to need to produce energy somehow and not just stop–I personally think nuclear energy is our best hope until we have such technology as orbital solar batteries build from asteroids and high power wireless energy transfer, if you think there’s a better option before that I’m very open to hearing of it, but nothing is not a responsible option here).

not to mention, abandoning it as is not only condemns millions of species to extinction but it condemns most of humanity to die for crimes they had no part in, largely the victims of colonialism and imperialism, that ain’t any kind of solution i want to be a part of.

the same goes for Musk and all his Musk bros and other adherents to that awful ideology, just leaving Earth and colonizing another planet ain’t a solution either. if you can’t live sustainably on one planet you’re only gonna destroy the next one eventually, then what is your long term vision, becoming locusts who roam from planet to planet leaving death in our wake? is that a civilization that even deserves to exist?

and I believe in space colonization, really I truly do, but not for that reason, not like that. I mean this planet is immeasurably precious, it gave us everything, what kind of selfish people would we be to just die now or let a small number depart for another world and leave our damage done?

so if you ask me, inevitably we have no choice but to try to fix the damage we caused, one day even fascists are going to overwhelmingly accept this, and they will take advantage of it, and we have to be prepared for that, to resist and prevent them from exploiting that opportunity to enact genocide. I write science fiction to try to warn people about such eventualities and I hope even one person listens.

the obsession with “nature” is a problem. nature doesn’t exist, we made it up, this ideal of what the world should be, but the universe doesn’t should be anything, it just is, and its nature is constant evolution, from the first femtosecond of time to the heat death of the universe, and whatever expanses lie beyond that. the idea that things would be better off if we just died and left it to nature is foolish. we’ve caused damage that can’t be reversed organically, not without the pointless death of millions of entire species. we are nature as much as any other species and we have a damn responsibility to prevent ecological collapse we set in motion.

we have to fix this problem, and fix our own species, our civilization, it’s the only hope for us, in my opinion, we have to become better, and not just a small number of us, all of us who are part of this great organism Earth.

that’s what Alice thinks

.hg so I'm banging some code out, right

#rust is complaining that a certain type isn't deserializable. I don't particularly care yet, because I'm trying to fix errors in other parts of the code, so I slap a `#[serde(skip)]` on there. /That/ doesn't work because the type isn't defaultable either. The obvious thing to reach for in this case is `unimplemented!()`, but that won't work; serde attributes only accept bare paths.

Since I'm trying to slap together at maximum speed the minimum stuff that will compile—and come back to it once the other things are done—I ask our brain for a function (not a macro!) that takes no arguments and always diverges. `_: fn() -> !`. Do we know of any such function that already exists?

Why, yes we do, in fact: `std::process::abort()`.

```
#[derive(Serialize, Deserialize)]
struct Foo {
#[serde(skip, default = "std::process::abort")]
bar: Bar,
}
```

:up
^Z
cargo check

my therapist: and what do we do when we feel like this?

me: identify the oppressive social systems responsible and dismantle the fuck out of them

my therapist: oh yeah that's way better than what i was gonna say

One meter is technically defined by the speed of light and a Cs-133 clock at 9.2 GHz, but it's not very practical. For real-world length measurement tasks you use light interferometry. But how do you obtain traceability from a microwave frequency to visible light?

Easy! Here how: Lock a hydrogen clock to the cesium clock first because for better short-term stability, then lock a 100 MHz crystal oscillator to the hydrogen clock to get started. Then, lock a 22.7 GHz Gunn oscillator to the 100 MHz crystal oscillator with a mixer and a PLL. Next, lock a 386.5 GHz Backward Wave Oscillator to the Gunn oscillator. Next, derive a 4251.76 GHz methanol laser from the BWO. Next, derive the 13C 16O2 laser at 29770.665 GHz from that with a mixer, a counter and a 8.99 GHz Gunn oscillator. Next, derive a 29477.165 GHz CO2 from that with a mixer, a PLL, and a 73.35 GHz Klystron oscillator. Next, derive a 28464.674 GHz laser, which derives a 28464.684 GHz then a 29477.165 GHz laser with a mixer, .... #electronics

agda (not to be confused with ada)

In a summary of the paper on Cambridge's security research blog, the researchers explain that even if you start with unbiased - that is, broadly representative - data, the *order* in which you present that data to a machine-learning model can induce bias:

https://www.lightbluetouchpaper.org/2021/04/23/data-ordering-attacks/

That's because ML models are susceptible to "initialization bias" - whatever data they see first has a profound impact on the overall weighting of subsequent data. Here's an example from the researchers' blog:

9/

Pick an encryption method that we know is vulnerable to quantum computers.

Encrypt a drive with it, and fill it up with a bunch of stuff currently important to you.

Conveniently forget the decryption key, put the drive in storage.

Perhaps one day you’ll be able to open this time capsule. ​

Pe Lang has a temporary exhibition in Paris (in https://www.deniserene.fr/) until ~first week of July: https://bibliogram.art/p/Cdf2MDjseRm

Pe Lang makes artifacts that, for me, show some nonobvious or obvious-but-often-overlooked physical property. https://www.pelang.ch/works.html has some examples (but even not the ones I liked most when I saw his exhibition in, sadly defunct, museum of digital art in Zürich).

it's crazy: the first cultural experience of metrics, tracking and the politics of proxies is not in social media. it is being graded at school.

.hg i want a way to put E into tapioca pearls so that we can have

booba tea

I'F YOU CAN'T HANDLE ME AT MY WOR'ST....
THAT'S OKAY!!;

-I CAN BE A LOT SOMETIMES
-ONE TIME I CRIED BECASUE A LIZERD WAS TO CUTE
-YOUR NOT MY THERRAPIST
-I HAVE OTHER SUPPORT SYSTEM'S
-WHAT IF WERE BOTH IN A BAD MOOD AND WE FIGHT OVER WHO FORGOT TO PUT AWAY THE BAG OF CHIPS
-WE CAN JUST PLAY MINECRAFT LATER ITLL BE A GOOD HANG

helo if you’ve been following us for a while you may already have the powderpaint EP and be waiting for the next one (new singles coming very soon!!), but if not, today, being bandcamp friday, where 100% proceeds go to the artist, is the day to do it

https://powderpaint.bandcamp.com/album/powderpaint