timorl @timorl@qoto.org

Recommendations wanted: cross platform relational database app.

I used HandBase for over a decade, starting with my palm pilot! It was a lightweight & powerful, intuitive app that made it easy to create relational databases that could either sync w/Access or its own desktop version.

It hasn't updated in years. Likely abandoned.

Anyone know of a similar product that will sync b/w android & windows?

I loathe software-as-a-service & would rather just pay for a program.

(Boosts welcome!)

You’re saying this clock works by attuning to the universal harmony of crystal vibrations? Lol okay 🙄

"They hang the man and flog the woman
Who steals the goose from off the common
Yet let the greater villain loose
That steals the common from the goose

The law demands that we atone
When we take things we do not own
But leaves the lords and ladies fine
Who take things that are yours and mine"

Someone made an app for blind people to check to see if their face is in the camera view, good for video conferencing. #a11y #accessibility

https://canyouseeme.app/

Apparently using *they* as a singular pronoun (to use instead of *he* and *she*) is hardly a new phenomenon. It dates back to 1375 in written records!

In fact, singular *you* is much more recent! Dating back to the 17th century! 😂

Oh, this quote's fun, and it shows that our gender-related issues has been going on for centuries:

> In 1794, a contributor to the New Bedford Medley mansplains to three women that the singular they they used in an earlier essay in the newspaper was grammatically incorrect and does no ‘honor to themselves, or the female sex in general.’ To which they honourably reply that they used singular they on purpose because ‘we wished to conceal the gender,’ and they challenge their critic to invent a new pronoun if their politically-charged use of singular they upsets him so much.

Source:
https://public.oed.com/blog/a-brief-history-of-singular-they/

I'd say it's probably safe to use *they* in general. I do use singular *they* regularly and it's the least fuss imo.

#English #Language #Pronouns #They

👾 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/