@curtosis@mastodon.social avatar

curtosis

@curtosis@mastodon.social

Computational linguist, artificer, λ(data). Syntactician with semanticist delusions. Theatre artist. Anti-Taylorist. Continuous everywhere, differentiable nowhere. Boosts are multivalent. He/they.

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interfluidity, to random
@interfluidity@zirk.us avatar

could a supreme court justice be disbarred?

curtosis,
@curtosis@mastodon.social avatar

@dpp @interfluidity Technically there are no qualifications beyond nomination and confirmation.* You don’t have to even have attended law school!

*AIUI it’s not clear whether the Senate actually has to affirmatively vote to confirm, or whether silence = assent as long as they don’t vote against.

alex, to random

Apropos of nothing this Friday: a reminder to never use Google Scholar for correct citations! They are wrong for everything except arXiv papers! And even then it's dicey! It's a shit product!

If anything, use DOIs and Zotero!

For instance, one way I assume that someone hasn't actually read Ruha Benjamin's Race After Technology, despite citing it, is that the citation is to a Social Forces review of the book, which says the publisher is Wiley, and not Polity.

curtosis,
@curtosis@mastodon.social avatar

@alex My go-to example is that it thinks noted African linguist Dr. Sam Mchombo is actually Irish (McHombo).

curtosis, to random
@curtosis@mastodon.social avatar

I continue to be shocked at how many general counsels appear to be signing off on anything LLM-produced.

At a previous company I was stuck meeting with counsel for weeks nailing down specific IP ownership assertions for every module of the system.

(And that’s just in the IP space! It’s infecting highly-regulated industries as well!)

curtosis,
@curtosis@mastodon.social avatar

@dpp I guess not all that surprising, when the entire CEO class is in thrall. “Lawyers don’t have positions; clients have positions” and all that.

It’s an incredibly depressing time to be in the industry, and I fear the crash is going to be a kind of ugly we’ve not seen in living memory.

jwz, to random
@jwz@mastodon.social avatar

Is Xcode actually a program, or a fractal zipbomb of nested installers?

Software update: "New Xcode!"
I fill with dread.
Two hours later: Finally launch Xcode.
Xcode: "Oh, did you want a compiler?? Update tools! Update components!"
Two hours later: press "Run".
Xcode: "Suddenly you have no simulators! Those old ones, they were no good! Download a single simulator!"
Four hours later...

curtosis,
@curtosis@mastodon.social avatar

@jwz The cheat code is to never have more than 10GB free space on the laptop so it can’t actually update.

curtosis,
@curtosis@mastodon.social avatar

@screwtape @me @retrocomputing Tbh if you’re gonna go FPGA, why not go 36-bit and keep the tag bits? (This is what I keep thinking of doing, anyway.)

curtosis,
@curtosis@mastodon.social avatar

@screwtape @amszmidt @me @retrocomputing I do vaguely recall it was an interesting question, though not the details. I will admit at least partial interest in the Because I Can factor of historical recreation. ;-)

foone, to random
@foone@digipres.club avatar

Why is the Bart diesel? Do they not have electricity in the bay area?

curtosis,
@curtosis@mastodon.social avatar

@gsuberland @foone Most diesel-electrics can’t do this by default; they have to be specifically built as dual-mode. NJ Transit, LIRR, and Amtrak/Metro-North operate some to cover more exurban stretches out of the city.

NanoRaptor, to random
@NanoRaptor@bitbang.social avatar

You get to make one change to any single genus of animal that’s immediately applied to all of its members worldwide.

What do you change for maximum chaos?

curtosis,
@curtosis@mastodon.social avatar

@NanoRaptor Human parthenogenesis.

otheorange_tag, to random
@otheorange_tag@mstdn.social avatar

I see that the #z80 is at end of life. What we all need is a z80 that runs at (checks notes) 10GHz!! Even if we need to use forbidden codes to mark Pipelineable sections...

curtosis,
@curtosis@mastodon.social avatar

@otheorange_tag I have a sudden desire to see an ECL #Z80. No weird ordering or speculative execution, just raw 10GHz clock speed. Giant power supply and heatsinks are retro too!

curtosis, to random
@curtosis@mastodon.social avatar

I can think offhand of a dozen “insights” that most actual scientists aren’t aware of. Because they aren’t insights, they’re just wrong.
https://dair-community.social/@trochee/112298629516391593

louis, to random
@louis@emacs.ch avatar

Or, we could just build our own Mastodon client with Common Lisp.

Took me less time to build this with than desparately trying to fetch that data in the Web UI.

Who knows what this will morph into. :p

curtosis,
@curtosis@mastodon.social avatar

@louis I’m always conflicted about . They have some fantastic affordances but the Hobbyist license fees are higher than most “professional” tools. Certainly more than I can justify for my scale of projects just to not have them time out. And multiply by not running the same platform on my laptop as on the server in my closet.

To be clear, I’m not saying it’s /wrong/ per se; the economics are what they are. Just sad that it prices me out.

dpp, to random
@dpp@mastodon.social avatar

Does anyone know of an open source graph database that supports > 1T edges?

curtosis,
@curtosis@mastodon.social avatar

@MartinClausen @dpp The GPL edition maxes out at 34Bn nodes so upper bound on edges will be dependent on connectedness. But it’s also capped at 4 cores on a single node, so you’re prolly gonna have a bad time.

curtosis,
@curtosis@mastodon.social avatar

@dpp @MartinClausen I was being as neutral as I could. :) They’ve also worked very hard to make their product synonymous with “graph database”in ways I find cross an ethical
line.

curtosis, to random
@curtosis@mastodon.social avatar

And delete the models trained on it, right?

Right?
https://mas.to/@carnage4life/112201336071076980

mattblaze, to random
@mattblaze@federate.social avatar

In the last 24 hours, people here have gotten upset with me for using quotes ironically, mixing jokes with non-jokes, poorly defining street photography, and disrespecting at least one of the value of Pi, international calendar formats, or Europe (I'm not sure which).

Please send any future complaints to the dean, who will gladly commiserate with you.

curtosis,
@curtosis@mastodon.social avatar

@mattblaze The dean of George Washington University will absolutely be hearing from me.

whitequark, to random
@whitequark@mastodon.social avatar

it's so bizarre to me that Remington, a manufacturer of typewriters to me, is much more well known in the US as a manufacturer of small arms https://www.youtube.com/shorts/IVt8g5FhKGY

it's kind of like hearing that everyone is mad at your stationery vendor for them enabling knife crime

curtosis,
@curtosis@mastodon.social avatar

@whitequark They separated in the early 90s, but the Ball Corporation, of home-canning jar, fame also made spy satellites.

curtosis,
@curtosis@mastodon.social avatar

@whitequark I think that was the original connection (“hey, we’re pretty good at glass”) but very quickly grew into pointing systems, star trackers, and eventually sensors.

veer66, to random Thai
@veer66@vivaldi.net avatar

In 1999, I tried to learn Common Lisp from textbooks, however, I couldn't understand why I should use it. For example, I didn't see the advantage of writing a Fibonacci sequence function recursively without tail-call optimization when a for-loop seemed simpler. Arrays also worked well for me, so I didn't grasp the point of using singly linked lists as the default data structure. These challenges led me to have many reasons to avoid Common Lisp. Therefore, I don't complain or even ask why it's not popular these days.

curtosis,
@curtosis@mastodon.social avatar

@screwtape @veer66 @lispi314 I’m not familiar with the Sandewall reference Got a link or more info?

nixCraft, to random
@nixCraft@mastodon.social avatar

Why does Python get so much hate? It is literally like a Basic programming language. Easy to learn and guaranteed to get a job because of massive demand.

curtosis,
@curtosis@mastodon.social avatar

@nixCraft Because it’s actually not that easy. It has a number of things that seem easy but are in fact quite complex for beginners.

It’s also a complete disaster in terms of dependency management, and has no coherent packaging and distribution story.

dpp, to random
@dpp@mastodon.social avatar

First world problems: your bidet’s controller runs out of batteries in the middle on the night…

curtosis,
@curtosis@mastodon.social avatar

@dpp I’m temporarily reduced to a medieval standard toilet seat myself, and feel your pain. Might as well not have indoor plumbing.

mattblaze, to photography
@mattblaze@federate.social avatar

De-electrified, Philadelphia, PA, 2005.

High potential pixels at https://www.flickr.com/photos/mattblaze/2155416560/

#photography

curtosis,
@curtosis@mastodon.social avatar

@mattblaze Smart of you to use film, instead of trying to capture three-phase powerlines with a PhaseOne back.

Daojoan, to random
@Daojoan@mastodon.social avatar

The fundamental truth at the heart of right-wing communities: the satisfaction derived from sharing their viewpoints and beliefs is intrinsically linked to the presence of a progressive adversary who will respond to them.

It's not the platform that matters, nor the freedom it offers. It's an opposition to berate and belittle.

https://joanwestenberg.com/blog/what-are-the-conservatives-going-to-do-talk-to-each-other

curtosis,
@curtosis@mastodon.social avatar

@Daojoan @AlgoCompSynth

The Cruelty is the Point.

(I’m convinced Adam Serwer’s work will be in future history curricula.)

18+ mekkaokereke, (edited ) to random
@mekkaokereke@hachyderm.io avatar

Remember when we let one far-right dude make up the whole critical race theory panic, and then reactionaries passed "anti-CRT" laws that were really anti-diversity laws, so that teachers were afraid to even teach about civil rights and the Holocaust, and then US students' knowledge of the Holocaust dropped precipitously? And it dropped the most where those anti-CRT laws were passed?

Well, what if we let the same dude make up a whole plagiarism inquisition against the Harvard president?

curtosis,
@curtosis@mastodon.social avatar

@donray @drawks @mmlvx @poloniousmonk @Itty53 @valthonis @venitamathias @mekkaokereke

Also mportant to not confuse “rural” with “poor”. The average US farmer is a millionaire, with 40% more wealth than the average nonfarmer. They tend to vote like other wealthy landowners.

curtosis,
@curtosis@mastodon.social avatar

@drawks @donray @mmlvx @poloniousmonk @Itty53 @valthonis @venitamathias @mekkaokereke Yes, which is why I compared it to average nonfarmers.

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