robryk @robryk@qoto.org
I enjoy things around information theory (and data compression), complexity theory (and cryptography), read hard scifi, currently work in infosec, am somewhat literal minded and have approximate knowledge of random things. I like when statements have truth values, and when things can be described simply (which is not exactly the same as shortly) and yet have interesting properties.
I live in the largest city of Switzerland (and yet have cow and sheep pastures and a swimmable lake within a few hundred meters of my place :)). I speak Polish, English, German, and can understand simple Swiss German and French.
If in doubt, please err on the side of being direct with me. I very much appreciate when people tell me that I'm being inaccurate. I think that satisfying people's curiosity is the most important thing I could be doing (and usually enjoy doing it). I am normally terse in my writing and would appreciate requests to verbosify.
I appreciate if my grammar or style is corrected (in any of the languages I use here).
Joined Nov 2020
How thick (perpendicularly to the surface) is a stroke of a nonerasable marker? Does it depend on its color? I assume it does depend on the surface -- I would expect it to have no thickness on paper but some thickness on e.g. metal.
Totally random: videos on https://www.youtube.com/@Shaddicus give a perspective on powerplant operations that's otherwise hard to get (for me they explained a few things that I found surprising in simulators).
robryk
boosted
this past Saturday night, a Dutch train conductor was punched and knocked down the stairs by a rowdy passenger, and so this coming Saturday night, they’re gonna throw the brakes on the entire national train system for a few minutes to give everyone an earful about respect and safety. I’m bringing this up because I feel like no American institution would do that because one of their employees got decked by a customer.
robryk
boosted
https://github.com/GlasgowEmbedded/glasgow/blob/main/CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md
Now that's how you write a code of conduct.
robryk
boosted
looking for work, boosts appreciated
I’m a software developer with about 6 years of experience. My most recent work was in Rust, but I’m also comfortable with C++ and Go, and happy to work with any language. Most of my experience is with, broadly speaking, backend work. I also have SRE skills, a strong background in mathematics and CS, experience working with distributed systems and cryptography, and experience prioritizing and organizing work within a team.
I would prefer a job that:
Provides a non-negative value to society.
Preferably is remote, but I live in Switzerland and am willing to relocate to English or German speaking countries or Poland if the offer is interesting enough.
Works on something long-term, rather than chasing trends.
Any leads appreciated! #GetFediHired
Disclaimer: quarter-baked
Roughly half of primary school students have some experience with the concept of braids and maybe with the practice of making them. At the same time braids are nice objects to study, because they form a noncommutative group with infinite order elements.
So, would it be possible to pose some interesting-but-approachable problems about braids[1] to primary school kids? Obvious ideas for me are:
- how can we describe a braid?
- do two braid descriptions describe the same braid? what does this even mean? this can naturally introduce a concept of "invariants" (in the sense of a function from a braid representation that is equal for all representations of the same braid) and the concept of transformations of descriptions (and then maybe completeness of that)
- is every braid a commutator of two braids? (sadly this doesn't seem very natural here),
- what generator sets are there? is it sufficient to flip adjacent strands only?
[1] morally similar to "how many isometries does a cube have?"
Silly me, obviously for any larger exponent the thing diverges and for any smaller it converges to constant 0 (at least pointwise). It's sufficient to look at stddev of position at some fixed time.
I'm curious if this is some common writing system that I'm unfamiliar with. Anyone recognizes it? (A person from my city's road construction office signs announcements like this.)
TIL that the sequence of increasingly finegrained random walks that converges to Wiener process has walks that increase their speed as they get finer (speed grows with square root of scale). Post factum it seems kinda obvious: you'd otherwise converge to a constant function. I haven't yet figured out how this changes as one adjusts the exponent.
robryk
boosted
My new novel MORPHOTROPHIC is available now!
You can read the first two chapters here:
https://www.gregegan.net/MORPHOTROPHIC/00/MorphotrophicExcerpt.html
robryk
boosted
It's not only that machines are nondeterministic (after all, positions of all electrons in a relay circuit are not really deterministic in any way, shape, or form), but that the abstractions they present aren't (or are leaky-thus-wrong in a way that exposes the nondeterminism).
The whole area of concurrent data structures is IMO (but I'm biased) a very nice example of eking out as much determinism as you can out of a system that's nondeterministic at the next lower abstraction level. Another similar area are distributed protocols, in particular ones that admit adversaries.
It also struck me at some point that we don't really have reasonable fault-tolerant computing models: we have lots of ways of handling faulty storage, but very little for handling faulty logic. The ones I know of either replicate all of it, or are reifications of some byzantine-tolerant distributed protocol. I know of ~none that are aimed at handling cases of stochastic breakdown as cheaply as possible that are not just heuristics.
Do people drink coffee with lemon juice? If not, why not? Is the combination of the tastes terrible, or does something happen chemically when one adds it?
robryk
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Das erinnert mich daran, dass mein Bruder in den 90ern mit seinen Freunden eine LAN-Party organisiert hat.
Meine Eltern und ich sind hingefahren, um uns das Spektakel anzusehen - und haben Oma mitgenommen.
Sie war ganz beeindruckt, wie sehr sich die jungen Leute für sowas begeistern können, und wieviel Arbeit die da reinstecken, und wie höflich die alle sind :-)
Danach war Oma in jeder unsinnigen Killerspiel-Debatte auf der Seite der Gamer <3
https://social.tchncs.de/@Erdrandbewohner/112190165994603403
robryk
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@brie @pluszysta no więc ja sobie czasem żegluję, i kiedyś obserwowałem śląską załogę pokazowo robiącą manewry na kotwicy.
Zwykły zestaw komend na rzucenie kotwicy to:
- Przygotować kotwicę do rzucenia!
- Kotwica do rzucenia klar!
- Kotwicę rzuć!
Ślązacy zapodali:
- Ankiel do ciepania rychtuj!
- Ankiel do ciepania klar!
- Ankiel ciep!
Zrobili mi wtedy dzień. Mi i reszcie portu. Szacun.
robryk
boosted
@rust I plan to start prepending "Being fully aware that we have no control over how the Universe works or what the future holds," to all my emails.
robryk
boosted
The fact that the opposite to “steerswoman“ is “figurehead man” is absolutely perfect, you definitely cannot expect a truthful answer from one of these.
robryk
boosted
Wir tauchen ab ins Reduit, folgen den Irrwegen von Überwachern und gespeicherten Daten, die fast vollständige Abziehbilder unseres Lebens formen.
❗Heute Abend❗ im Theater Neumarkt – mit @adfichter, @sylkegruhnwald, @karpi, Kristina Malyseva u. a.
https://www.republik.ch/veranstaltungen/wir-haben-nichts-zu-verbergen
Stories by Naomi Kritzer are optimistic (sometimes unrealistically so) and very charming. (This is based on a sample of size 2 for now.)
@freemo Since the update I get multiple end of voting notifications for each poll I have voted in (e.g. just got 10 notifications in a row for https://mastodon.nz/@pezmico/112028203100230568). It doesn't bother me so far, but I figure it might be a symptom of something with other annoying consequences.
I enjoy things around information theory (and data compression), complexity theory (and cryptography), read hard scifi, currently work in infosec, am somewhat literal minded and have approximate knowledge of random things. I like when statements have truth values, and when things can be described simply (which is not exactly the same as shortly) and yet have interesting properties.
I live in the largest city of Switzerland (and yet have cow and sheep pastures and a swimmable lake within a few hundred meters of my place :)). I speak Polish, English, German, and can understand simple Swiss German and French.
If in doubt, please err on the side of being direct with me. I very much appreciate when people tell me that I'm being inaccurate. I think that satisfying people's curiosity is the most important thing I could be doing (and usually enjoy doing it). I am normally terse in my writing and would appreciate requests to verbosify.
I appreciate if my grammar or style is corrected (in any of the languages I use here).
Joined Nov 2020
