@aoanla@hachyderm.io avatar

aoanla

@aoanla@hachyderm.io

distributed computing for HEP
thinks teaching is important
does stuff behind the scenes for roller derby
sometimes writes pretentious essays about RPGs, SF or video games
always picked trichords in SimEarth

fan of :julia_lang: :rust: :vim: :commodore: :DS9: :mint_linux_logo: Ⓐ #raspi #burningwheel
mostly 🅭🅯🄎

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hrefna, to random
@hrefna@hachyderm.io avatar

Me: <sees a book on girlfriend's shelf titled 'The King in Yellow'>
Me: <picks it up and glances into it>
Me: <sees that it is a play>
Me: <IMMEDIATELY SHUTS THE BOOK>
Me to girlfriend: "…why do you have this?"

Her: "Because it makes a great LARP prop and people have one of two reactions to it. They either think it is a weird play or, noticing that it is a play, they throw it across the room. It's great."

aoanla,
@aoanla@hachyderm.io avatar

@hrefna brave to have even opened the book in the first place, you can't be too careful with elder gods

hrefna, to random
@hrefna@hachyderm.io avatar

As a kid when I first heard the story of Odysseus and Polyphemus I always felt bad for Polyphemus.

You broke in, killed his sheep and goats (ended up after all of this stealing his favorite ram), and hung around—against the advice of your crew—because you thought he might give you a gift?

I'm not surprised that he decided you would be tasty. Nor when you give him your name, address, and social security number am I surprised he reported you up the chain, as it were.

aoanla,
@aoanla@hachyderm.io avatar

@hrefna which version of the story is that? It's the cheese and wine Odysseus' men steal from Polyphemus (the goats they kill are on the island nearby, and Odysseus at least claims to believe they're wild) - they only steal the sheep from Polyphemus after Odysseus blinds him, because he's eaten at least 4 of his men at that point... (What I'm saying here is that no-one comes out of this one well - but, absolutely, I also felt (and feel) sorry for Polyphemus too !)

aoanla,
@aoanla@hachyderm.io avatar

@hrefna Hm, true, so they do kill at least one of Polyphemus' flock. (Personally, I think it's the gloating Odysseus does after blinding Polyphemus and getting away with stuff that makes me feel sorry for the cyclops - there's no need to rub it in, you've already ruined his life!)

mklopez, to DoctorWho
@mklopez@mastodon.social avatar

[SPOILERS] The ending of episode "73 Yards" didn't reveal what the woman was saying to get people to run away from Ruby, and it seems we may never know. https://www.radiotimes.com/tv/sci-fi/doctor-who-73-yards-mystery-newsupdate/

aoanla,
@aoanla@hachyderm.io avatar

@Uraael @mklopez yeah, obviously we should never be told what the woman whispers to people [and it's not necessary for RTD to even know what it is, and he probably doesn't]. (On the other hand, apparently the signing the woman is doing was based on a sequence in BSL, so...)

jynersolives, to DoctorWho
@jynersolives@mastodon.social avatar

Hot tip for anyone interested in getting into (modern)

  1. Get a good VPN so that you can access the BBC iPlayer and watch for free

  2. DO NOT START WITH ROSE OR ANY EPISODES 1!!! Instead start with these episodes:

s1e6: Dalek
s2e4: Girl In The Fireplace
s3e10: Blink
s4e10: Midnight
s5e10: Vincent & the Doctor
s6e11: God Complex
2013: Day Of the Doctor
s8e4: Listen
s9e5: Girl Who Died
s10e3: Thin Ice
s11e6: Demons Of The Punjab
s11 special: Resolution

aoanla,
@aoanla@hachyderm.io avatar

@jynersolives I do think it's amusing (and yes, I know, most recent season) that there's nothing from S12 or 13 there :D [If you were adding one from it, you know I'm going to suggest Fugitive of the Judoon... although I guess that's also super hard to follow if you've not seen a late-s1 episode to know who Jack is...]

jynersolives, to DoctorWho
@jynersolives@mastodon.social avatar

There's probably one issue I have with a lot of RTD-written episodes of #DoctorWho Season One: they rarely establish a rulebook and play by it. It's all very vague and whimsical a la "and then this happened". In "The Giggle" we had some rules laid out with the Toymaker but e.g. in "The Devil's Chord" I had no idea why stuff that happened actually happened. It's a bit similar with "73 Yards", which was held together by atmosphere and Millie Gibson.

aoanla,
@aoanla@hachyderm.io avatar

@jynersolives this isn't just "Season One" though, this is just "how RTD writes Doctor Who" - his original run follows mostly the same pattern, after all (and of course the original New Who Season One ended with a literal deus-ex-machina as close to magic as RTD could get away with back then...)

jynersolives, to StarTrek
@jynersolives@mastodon.social avatar

I haven’t seen a lot of #StarTrekDiscovery discussions on my home feed, despite the fact that I follow a good many #StarTrek hashtags and Trekkies. Is nobody watching the final season?

aoanla,
@aoanla@hachyderm.io avatar

@mrdalesmith @jynersolives yeah, I am not signing up to Yet Another Streaming Service just to get Disco & STW "on release"

jynersolives, to DoctorWho
@jynersolives@mastodon.social avatar

We've seen four episodes now of the "new new" #DoctorWho and RTD's take/vision of this era and I have to say, with the exception of #Boom, I remain very much on the fence. It's too "magical" for my liking, it doesn't do a lot of sci-fi stuff or concepts. And it has the usual silliness dialed to 11 (or 12), all amplified by RTD's sledgehammer writing style. It's somewhat ok and at times interesting, even charming, but overall I still don't know if it's for me. Which is fine.

aoanla,
@aoanla@hachyderm.io avatar

@jynersolives @peteriskrisjanis yeah, back when RTD was running Who, I didn't get on with any of his Finales completely... and now he's turning up all the things that annoyed me about his writing last time around to 11...

I will push back and say that RTD's writing "magic" in two ways - 1 "stuff that isn't SF", which is fine, but also 2) "resolutions which don't follow logically" which is not fine (and which too many poor writers of Fantasy think is part of 1) )

hywan, (edited ) to rust
@hywan@fosstodon.org avatar

Faster linking times on nightly on Linux using `rust-lld, https://blog.rust-lang.org/2024/05/17/enabling-rust-lld-on-linux.html.

> Here are more details from the ripgrep example mentioned above: linking is reduced 7x, resulting in a 40% reduction in end-to-end compilation times

tl;dr: Rust now packages a rust-lld linker (it’s LLVM’s lld), and uses it on Linux by default on nightly, which decreases compilation time greatly.

aoanla,
@aoanla@hachyderm.io avatar

@hywan I hope you mean "increases compilation speed greatly" or "decreases compilation time greatly"! (It's a very exciting change to see!)

jynersolives, to DoctorWho
@jynersolives@mastodon.social avatar

So I'm a bit behind the new and just watched . What do y'all think of it?

aoanla,
@aoanla@hachyderm.io avatar

@jynersolives it felt like a mashup of the first two Nine episodes with a little more horror. Very RTD, in both + and - ways

aoanla,
@aoanla@hachyderm.io avatar

@jynersolives to be fair to RTD he at least understands themes better than Chibnal did. It's just that he also obviously has his own comfort zone, which this new intro reveals the narrowness of

Impossible_PhD, to random
@Impossible_PhD@hachyderm.io avatar

Oh, wow, I'm already LOVING Hades 2!!

aoanla,
@aoanla@hachyderm.io avatar

@Impossible_PhD I installed it, I just need to find the time to play it :D

alice_i_cecile, to rust
@alice_i_cecile@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

Hi #rustlang #gamedev! I ran a quick survey last week examining the state of Rust Gamedev in 2024. There were 410 responses in five days: thanks a ton for all of your replies!

Most interesting bits to me were that 70% of respondents use Bevy, people seem generally happy with Rust, and that about 20% of respondents have commercial aspirations. Everyone hates compile times, wants engine features and tools for artists: useful to confirm but not news!

https://www.reddit.com/r/rust_gamedev/comments/1cka6n8/informal_rust_gamedev_in_2024_survey_results/

aoanla,
@aoanla@hachyderm.io avatar

@alice_i_cecile I think what's most interesting is going through the free-comment field at the end - lots of common rust bugbears there ("orphan rule", "tiny stdlib/cargo dependency explosion", "stabilise SIMD/variadic generics/other feature that's been waiting to stabilise for a million years") that aren't gamedev specific.

molly0xfff, (edited ) to random
@molly0xfff@hachyderm.io avatar

<s>Two</s> Three more questions. Please answer both!

  1. When were the "good old days" of the net?
aoanla,
@aoanla@hachyderm.io avatar

@molly0xfff in common with others, hard to answer q 3 - I was 16-25 in the time period in question, so equally choice 1 and 2 (which are also the most represented choices in general at the time of writing), so I picked neither

Impossible_PhD, to random
@Impossible_PhD@hachyderm.io avatar

Okay, so, odd question:

I've been struggle-bussing a bit over the last few days about struggling to find a home for my novel, and a lot of people have expressed interest. Obviously, since I'm trying to publish it, I can't share.

I started a different novel shortly after finishing it. About 10,000 words done, but shelved indefinitely because I've got SGW and other stuff to write. I like it a lot, but I don't and won't have time in the foreseeable future to keep working on it.

So... Wanna read?

aoanla,
@aoanla@hachyderm.io avatar

@Impossible_PhD @Dani @doctor_bimbo @OftOverthinking initial thoughts on reading it just now (I read fast) - the setting seems solid and well constructed; the writing is actually really very good. I like Tam, although I think you maybe tip your hand a bit about why they could do what they did (and certainly to anyone who read Tolkien), but I am also a naturally suspicious reader and have outside clues. I do really like the characterisation! It's much better than my scrap of an early novel :D

aoanla,
@aoanla@hachyderm.io avatar

@Impossible_PhD Yeah, absolutely, I get that - the separation of internal and external information is really good in that sense, too. The antimagic bit was just leading me to think that maybe we were going to have a more extended bit with the mages going down a "magical theory" route and ignoring less physical sciences possibilities...

jaycruz, to rust
@jaycruz@fosstodon.org avatar

This is a 48 minute long article that's critical of the Rust hype train vs C/C++. The TLDR is that while security is a problem, the Rust vs C choice as the only choice for low-level systems programming is a “non choice”. The author states that Go is a perfectly fine choice. https://medium.com/

#c

aoanla,
@aoanla@hachyderm.io avatar

@dcz @jaycruz yeah, I think it's important to be nuanced on this
As someone who really wanted Go to be the "safe C for low-level", I think you're right that the Rust argument is specifically that it can replace C for those things that used to be C/C++'s sole domain. The wider hype is just a consequence of C++'s domain of application IRL being wider than that - and people (inappropriately?) mapping that to Rust - not that Rust is worse than C/C++ in those areas, but it's also not the best

Impossible_PhD, to random
@Impossible_PhD@hachyderm.io avatar

... so, Stained Glass Woman just got cited in the scholarly literature. A literary analysis of transness in Nimona.

That was unexpected.

aoanla,
@aoanla@hachyderm.io avatar

@Impossible_PhD I'm honestly surprised that this is the first time - it's very good writing!

hrefna, to random
@hrefna@hachyderm.io avatar

Why are British queer groups (eg Mermaids) apparently more deferential to the Cass review while those outside are much sharper in their language?

It’s not like the British don’t have a long history of criticizing their government.

aoanla,
@aoanla@hachyderm.io avatar

@hrefna I don't know for certain, but the British establishment does have record on trying to crush uppity charities via investigations and the like . Mermaids in particular has already had the Charity Commission asked to investigate them, twice I think, and some of their funding has been paused during the investigation.
So, I would not be surprised if Mermaids, in particular, were being cautious.

hazelweakly, to random
@hazelweakly@hachyderm.io avatar

I have a somewhat controversial view of AI in that I don't think it's actually going to ruin anything because we were already doing a damn good job of throwing everything good about humanity in the trash long before AI came around.

That said, there's something that's really really painful to me: capitalism wants to control scarce resources, and late stage capitalism turned human interaction into a resource to be hoarded, harvested, and farmed.

AI magnified that, but the damage was already done

aoanla,
@aoanla@hachyderm.io avatar

@hazelweakly @gvwilson I think it's equally worth pointing out that the gif in Ben's article is misleading in that academia I don't think is "pushing" publish-or-perish - at least in the UK, most of the (STEM) academics I know are generally of the opinion that it's imposed on us externally (in the UK, via the REF, the "research assessment framework"), rather than being something we deeply value "as academics".

ethauvin, to rust
@ethauvin@mastodon.social avatar

Critical 'BatBadBut' Rust Vulnerability Exposes Windows Systems to Attacks

#batbadbut #cve #rustlang

https://thehackernews.com/2024/04/critical-batbadbut-rust-vulnerability.html?utm_medium=erik.in&utm_source=mastodon

aoanla,
@aoanla@hachyderm.io avatar

@ethauvin not a Rust vulnerability specifically, but one affecting many languages (Haskell, Python, Java, etc). And some of them aren't even intending to patch - people only heard about the Rust aspect because Rust is patching and taking it seriously.

aoanla,
@aoanla@hachyderm.io avatar

@ethauvin no, it's specifically a problem with how Windows handles command line arguments (via cmd.exe) in batch scripts. cmd.exe has weird parsing rules for arguments (and will ignore some attempts to escape) to programs, unlike the alternative Windows methods for handling arguments (which do the usual and correct thing every other shell does), but it's impossible to avoid cmd.exe being used to execute a program on Windows, so you need to be super paranoid to sanitize the resulting input.

alex, to random
@alex@dads.cool avatar

The “great” thing about England is that when these articles come out and you google the person who wrote them it’s not something boring like “their dad is a trust fund manager” it’s “their dad is a baron, their grandfather edited the newspaper this appears in, and their family founded the private Bank of England”

*all true of this writer

aoanla,
@aoanla@hachyderm.io avatar

@tanepiper @cstross @onepict @alex Ironically, it did, but the other way around. Crispin Money-Coutt's Great-great grandfather, Francis Money, was the son of the second daughter of the original Coutts, but complex will shenanigans precipitated by the first daughter marrying an American, which the will specifically ruled as cause for disinheritance (yes...) caused him to change his name by deed poll to Money-Coutts and inherit the wealth!

aoanla,
@aoanla@hachyderm.io avatar

@tanepiper @cstross @onepict @alex This was considered a bit of a joke even at the time - Punch published a little poem about it "Money takes the name of Coutts,
Superfluous and funny
For everyone considers Coutts,
Synonymous with Money."

aoanla,
@aoanla@hachyderm.io avatar

@onepict @tanepiper @cstross @alex it gets better - Queen Victoria herself apparently was moved to send a letter to the first daughter, Angela, asking her to think again about this "mad marriage" to an American...

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