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fawning over LaTeX, probably insufferable 

Whoop, adding one more level of abuse now, but this time I actually expect it to work, even though it's weird.

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fawning over LaTeX, probably insufferable 

Gods, I love LaTeX. I wrote something that I wasn't sure would work, and then hacked one more piece that felt like cheating and I expected it to fail, but no, turns out \newcommand just does rewrites, so everything works out of the box as I dreamed up. Lovely!

timorl boosted

I like how the real reason we still have a gender (sex) marker in passports is that it would be too much work to update all the software. Namely, I'm sure the collective of stereotypical trans girls can work out a deal where the government supplies the programmer socks and we fix their systems.

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timorl boosted

Maybe someone on fedi knows of any formalizations of probability theory in homotopy type theory? Any other type theory might be useful as well.

Maybe someone on fedi knows of any formalizations of probability theory in homotopy type theory? Any other type theory might be useful as well.

timorl boosted

btw my new video with @powderpaint is absolutely kickass go watch it if you haven't already

youtu.be/wynjpMVsEbw

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corporations, reality is horrible, mentions of various very bad things that happen often 

I propose that from now on, every time some corporation gets all self-congratulatory on social media, we respond with an uptempo “You're Almost Done!” and a list of every issue that the company still has. Every privacy violation, every anti-security-research policy, every hiring bias, every toxic workplace dynamic, every union-busting practice, every contract for blood resources, every user-facing process that's racist or classist or transmisic.

Rainbow capitalism posts. Posts about how progressive and inclusive it is. Posts about how it's improved its workplace. Posts about the cool new feature you'll love.

List all its failings, and say—like they say to us—#YoureAlmostDone!

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timorl boosted

Inflacja, rosnące stopy procentowe wpływające na wysokość rat kredytów hipotecznych oraz surowsze zasady oceny zdolności kredytowej - wszystkie te okoliczności sprzyjają rozmowie o dostępie do mieszkań w Polsce, a z tym jak wiadomo nie jest najlepiej.

Ale chyba jeszcze gorzej ma się dyskusja na ten temat, bo mieszkaniówka tak bardzo obrosła dewelopersko-bankową narracją, że trzeba przede wszystkim wiele powszechnie obiegowych opinii odkłamać.

Zapraszam do wysłuchania odcinka poświęconego mieszkaniom #podcast #mieszkania

anchor.fm/paulinamatysiak/epis

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early personal identity stuff 

The name was also a reference to a reference to 4chan culture, somewhat less happy about that.

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early personal identity stuff 

Just remembered the second time I encountered the notion of being bi (in a manga about... doctors? or veterinarians?) and thought it was so cool that I named my first IRC bot "RyoutouSlug". It's really a wonder how long it took me to figure all that stuff out after that...

Defining stuff in:
* type theory: uh, just remember to define everything in order?
* "classical mathematics": so we need these three sets, the first one can be arbitrary, but it's choice impacts how you pick the second one, while the third one has to be picked in the light of the full moon on the last Thursday of a month unless...

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moth zone antiblackness meta, an experiment (1/14) 

I want to do an experiment. I apologize for how self-indulgent this is, but ... y'know, like, a whole thing with this kind of blowup is that the original context is lost, so I want to see what happens if that context is reintroduced. I'm sure none of this will need explanation to folks who have been following this story.

(That said, feel free to ask for explanation - we didn't see all of this but we saw a lot.)

timorl boosted

I just learned that earlier this year, the logistics community of the Foxhole playerbase wrote a list of QoL demands to the developers, who predictably did not bother responding.
In response, participating logi players stopped doing their "jobs", and the frontlines started having serious supply issues. 49 days later the devs released a list of upcoming features, many of which specifically addressed the demands

Players went on strike in a game and won

timorl boosted
dubioza kolektiv when trustworthy kolektiv shows up
timorl boosted

Learning a lot about people who are saying we should be respectful and reverent at the moment because an old lady did what old ladies do and die.

Where were they when that old lady was wearing a diamond and gold hat and sitting on a gold chair while her subjects queue at food banks?

Their respect and reverence is clearly aimed at wealth and power, not human dignity.

#queen #monarchy #endthemonarchy

Welp, this day is shaping up impressively bad.

First my son got confused and came home early triggering some panic at the school and slightly disrupted my work.

Then a column of keys on my keyboard broke, making work infeasible.

Now the electricity *in the whole city district* is down and shows no sign of returning for an hour already.

!!FUN!!

timorl boosted

I've never really got into submitting my research to academic journals, they're super hard to access and read even when you work for an institution that subscribes to them, have very long delays from submission to publication, and are often super expensive to publish open access (££££s)..
That's been fine because google scholar is good at picking up conference papers etc that other citation databases do not.
But I just had the realisation that if google scholar went away (which is entirely possible, based on google's record) then I'd have no record of my work or its citations.. and I'm not sure what to do about that. I've been thinking of uploading all my papers to zenodo, but despite having DOIs, stuff there is practically ignored by other databases (including google scholar!). I'm not sure what to do about this..
Academic publishing and reporting is a total mess, completely compromised by publishing companies like Elsevier, with absolutely *astonishing* profit margins, and heavy investments in fossil fuels..

timorl boosted
Today, watching a thread about the topic unrelated to my post, I realized what is the second point of failure in (majority of) online and offline discussion.

The first one, which I identified quite a while ago, is obviously the lack of common paradigm base (and even worse – lack of awareness thereof).
The second one, which I was almost aware of for many months already, only today crystallized into a simple analytical form: metaphors are not homomorphic. Worse, most analogies aren't either.
Cutting the story really short, homomorphism allows us to map entity A onto entity B (that will be said metaphor or analogy) and then perform some intellectual operation on entity B, which result will be valid for entity A as well.
The most obvious example will be preparing to rearrange my room by drawing it in scale, putting scaled models of furniture there and play with the layout until I get it right. Then the result (new interior layout) is valid for the real (entity A) room as well. Unless...

Unless the room drawing is in a different scale than furniture cutouts. Or I forgot about the slanted ceiling, so the wardrobe will not fit in that corner. Let alone details like power sockets or light fixtures' layout.

And that is the issue with most of the discussions I can see online and offline. Usually, it is the Scylla and Charibdis situation: as we cannot find a common frame of reference for the literal issue we discuss, we use an analogy to move someplace safe (that is: some other process we can agree on). Say, we can agree that the wine spoiled by adding sewage is non-drinkable (and to all practical purposes becomes a sewage itself). Now, we carry on: so, if you agree with me about the wine (topic B), you must agree on topic A as well. If not – you MUST disagree about the wine as well, go and drink the bucket of wine with sewage to prove me wrong.
The trick (and point of failure) is, that we try to make a point of issue A (which we cannot, as there is no common paradigm frame to start with) by making a point about "analogical" issue B. Why? Because we either can practically prove our B-related point, or we can challenge the other person to prove us wrong. But the rift within the lute is that it cannot be transferred back to the issue A, as the proof still needs the common frame of reference, which is stubbornly absent there.
I believe now I have a better picture why most discussions (except most technical ones, perhaps) degenerate rather quickly into flaming and trolling. And I hope you may find these musings useful as well.

Have a wonderful day.

Funny picture below.





I have just mathematically proven that you gotta be pessimistic to be effective.*

*might be a slightly unjustified interpretation of the result

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