@msylor@noc.social
@msylor@noc.social avatar

msylor

@msylor@noc.social

Network System and Application Management. Mad Scientist, Architect, Applied Philosopher, and Teacher. (he/him)⛵️
Twitter: https://noc.social/@msylor

This profile is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.

msylor, to random
@msylor@noc.social avatar

With Trump trying to recreate the Third Reich, it is important to follow and spread the posts of Auschwitz Memorial to remind folks what that really leads to.
https://mastodon.world/@auschwitzmuseum/112481088613763643

msylor, to random
@msylor@noc.social avatar

@pluralistic
If you haven't seen it, this article in IEEE Spectrum is just nuts. https://spectrum.ieee.org/unicorn-startup Just like Amazon's grab and go stores, the whole company is smoke and mirrors hiding a team of Filipino workers who do the actual work. The author, Benjamin Shestakofsky, has writing a book "Behind the Startup" about his experience embedded there. https://bookshop.org/p/books/behind-the-startup-how-venture-capital-shapes-work-innovation-and-inequality-benjamin-shestakofsky/20685145?ean=9780520395039

This company is going to be enshittified in record time. I bet it's claiming AI drives it's matching to VCs.

msylor, to random
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Hurrah hurrah! Non Sequiter is on Mastodon!
https://mastodon.social/@Wileymiller/112298007486231147

ZachWeinersmith, to random
@ZachWeinersmith@mastodon.social avatar

10-year-old just got to function stuff and I'm having trouble explaining in general why you should care which variable is dependent vs independent? Other than that, in stats, you should know the direction of causality, does this sort of thing matter?

msylor,
@msylor@noc.social avatar

@ZachWeinersmith Most of the answers are good.

From math the terms come from the idea that any value can be chosen for the independent variable. But for that value only one value is produced by the function for the dependent variable.

For a kid, I’d describe it like this. Take a function like “how much a cat weighs “. For any cat (the independent variable) you choose, the function returns a single weight (the dependent variable).

msylor, to random
@msylor@noc.social avatar

Some of the best pictures I got from Monday's solar . 3 of them were taken using an app called SunSketcher, a crowd sourced citizen science study of the shape of the sun. Wait, isn't the sun a sphere? Not quite, like the Earth, it rotates and is oblate. But exactly how oblate, and thus its exact shape is very hard to measure. By photographing the eclipse, and comparing it's shape to the sun's using Bailey's beads allows more precise measurements. Wicked cool and glad to help.

A picture of the total eclipse on April 8, 2024 showing a ring around the moon. The moon appears as a dark circle surrounded by a bright white glow on a black background. Looking closely, there are brighter spots along the left, top, and right edges of the circle. These are the "Bailey's Beads".
A picture of the total eclipse on April 8, 2024 showing a "diamond ring" around the moon. The moon appears as a dark circle surrounded by a bright white glow on a black background. At the top left is a small bright white glowing spot at the edge where the sun has not quite disappeared.
A picture of the total eclipse on April 8, 2024 showing the sun's corona around the moon. The moon appears as a dark circle surrounded by a bright white glow 7 times wider than the moon. The sky is a dark blue background. Seen in the corona are brighter rays streaming straight out from the center in all directions.

pluralistic, to random
@pluralistic@mamot.fr avatar

Your periodic reminder that if you:

a) Dislike long threads and;

b) Follow someone who routinely posts long threads;

that is a YOU problem, which you can solve by unfollowing, and, if need be, blocking that user so they don't show up in your federated timeline.

msylor,
@msylor@noc.social avatar

@lemgandi @trantion @pluralistic I’ve used that filter ever since Cory mentioned it back when I first joined Mastodon. It makes his long threads enjoyable. I generally go to pluralistic.net to read the whole post, but Mastodon is where I discover them.
5/5 ⭐️ ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

bruces, to random
@bruces@mastodon.social avatar

*Hmm. This is a pre-refutation of the Vinge Singularity that I hadn't seen before

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Science,_Big_Science

msylor,
@msylor@noc.social avatar

@morten_skaaning @bruces Not blind. It’s hidden in the observation that exponential growth always seems to turn into logistic growth. It appears exponential at first, but some limit slows the growth, and it falls to a logistic S curve. Applying this to knowledge growth, or AI, means that while we see what looks like exponential growth now, is likely to become logistic.

Or to put it in another way; anything that can’t go on, won’t.
Examples:

  • Population
  • Coal burned
  • Trump voters
hazelweakly, to random
@hazelweakly@hachyderm.io avatar

I love explaining complicated subjects in a quippy way that isn't necessarily wrong. For example:

Kubernetes is 20 while-true loops in a trench coat pretending to be a container orchestration platform.

What are your favorite quippy ways to explain a complicated topic? It could be anything! I'm just curious what y'all have :)

msylor,
@msylor@noc.social avatar

@jcmrva @hazelweakly Gee, I always thought it was COME FROM wherever.

lauren, to threads
@lauren@mastodon.laurenweinstein.org avatar

Feeding #Threads trash into #Mastodon is the functional equivalent of when Tom Sawyer got the other kids to whitewash the fence for him for free. Only in this case Tom is Zuckerberg and his cohorts, laughing at the "Fediverse" rubes.

msylor,
@msylor@noc.social avatar

@lauren @lfourrier Not sure why post portability is impossible. Now I Haven’t studied the Activity Pub protocol and so don’t know the details. But the recent work at the IETF on content based networking (ICN) would seem to offer a way to locate a post no matter where it is in the fediverse.

msylor,
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@lauren @lfourrier I agree you can’t today download posts and upload posts to a different server, but that’s solvable more easily than finding a relocated post. Abandoned servers are a difficult problem, but that seems universal. Backups matter😉

In any case I think we agree that Mastodon really needs to make moving my entire online presence from one server to another easy. That interoperability is required to kill off bad actors like Meta.

ZachWeinersmith, to random
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Anyone in favor of mandatory interoperability for social media platforms? Sounds need but I have trouble imagining it in practice.

msylor,
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@ZachWeinersmith Yes. And so does Cory @pluralistic Their closed communication system is what allows them to control what you see, including the crap. Cory explains this in The Internet Con.
1/🧵

msylor,
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@ZachWeinersmith @pluralistic

I separate the communication layer from the moderation layer. At the communications layer I want to be able to receive posts from friends on Facebook. Mostly to allow them and I to move off Facebook ex-Twitter, et.al.
2/🧵

msylor,
@msylor@noc.social avatar

@ZachWeinersmith @pluralistic

At the moderation/publishing layer they can go rot in hell. I have no desire to see what Facebook thinks I might be interested in. I would love to be able to hire and fire editors and publishers to find cool stuff. But they can’t own the communications pipe. We didn’t let Time own the Post Office did we.
3/3

msylor, to random
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First Crocus of the year appears. Spring is coming to NH!

drmorr, to Engineering
@drmorr@hachyderm.io avatar

"We completely and utterly fucked it up by defining observability to mean “gigachad-scale JSON logs parser with a fancy search engine.” Really? Really? That’s the “we solve Real Serious Business Problems™” strategy we went with?"

@hazelweakly killing it here

https://hazelweakly.me/blog/redefining-observability/

msylor,
@msylor@noc.social avatar

@adrianco @drmorr @hazelweakly I prefer the term understandability to modelability just because it’s more familiar and hence simpler. Understandability has always been the missing link in observability (monitoring) systems. It does no good to collect tons of information if humans don’t understand what it means and what control actions it should imply.

msylor, to random
@msylor@noc.social avatar

@ksylor Is there an equivalent to eBPF in the browser? https://aus.social/@brendangregg/112071314028968734

I ask because back in my TOPS-20 days we had a tool called Snoop that allowed me to insert instrumentation into the kernel. It made some perf studies possible that were otherwise impossible. When I first heard of eBPF I immediately thought oh, that will be useful.

Now that the browser is effectively an OS, seems it would be useful to have a similar capability there…

petergleick, to random

RFK Jr. Superbowl ad uses lots of images of dead people, not one of whom would vote for him if they were alive.

msylor,
@msylor@noc.social avatar

@petergleick it’s a straight out steal of the Kennedy for me ad for JFK’s 1960 campaign. A real WTF moment.

dangillmor, to random
@dangillmor@mastodon.social avatar

If you aren't reading Josh Marshall's consistently on-point coverage of political journalism's consistent awfulness, you really should. In "More Angry Biden, Please" he adds essential context in ways Big Journalism refuses to do.

https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/more-angry-biden-please/sharetoken/9RNtjSGGVxF9?utm_source=brevo&utm_campaign=Backchannel%20NEW%20TEMPLATE%20259&utm_medium=email

Needless to say, the New York Times is operating the garbage truck at the front of this media parade.

msylor,
@msylor@noc.social avatar

@jab01701mid @dangillmor Try @talkingpointsmemo.com@rss-parrot.net
For a repost of their RSS feed.
I’ve asked for an official feed. The more that ask…

secretgeek, to random
@secretgeek@mastodon.cloud avatar

Hmm. This term “digital twin” is sometimes bandied about… and I was wondering how it is different from a “model” - ie a software model.

Well I have terrifying news. It’s the same, only marketing are involved so it’s dangerously over hyped. (I idly wonder how many people will die because of this particular piece of naïveté?)

In part 2 I will terrify you!
1/2

msylor,
@msylor@noc.social avatar

@secretgeek
Like you I’ve been trying to figure out where a digital twin differs from a model. Model based management is an old concept, I remember Lundy Lewis arguing for that ages ago. And I’m sure that you can’t manage any entity without some model of how it behaves. Any manager has a model in their mind that guides what they do to control something.

But the idea that a model can be perfect is pernicious. Models elide irrelevant details by definition.

msylor,
@msylor@noc.social avatar

@secretgeek
Or to put it more beautifully, read “On Exactitude in Science” https://kwarc.info/teaching/TDM/Borges.pdf
By Jorge Luis Borges https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jorge_Luis_Borges

msylor, to random
@msylor@noc.social avatar

this waterfall was right outside a restaurant in Peterborough we were at Sunday.

mrchrisadams, to random
@mrchrisadams@mastodon.social avatar

I learn loads following @nworbmot on social media, he posts some really interesting stuff on twitter.

Here's an example of the challenges when ppl talk about fossil gas burning power plants as a transition to fossil-free, hydrogen ones.

Even with this, there's still an issue around dealing with the nitrogen oxide emitted, which is more powerful warming gas than CO2 for the same volume.

https://nitter.net/nworbmot/status/1747941852215382136#m

/1

msylor,
@msylor@noc.social avatar

@mrchrisadams @nworbmot

Try https://rss-parrot.net/ it turns an RSS feed into a,Mastodon account you can follow.

woody, to random

RIP Dave Mills. Because of his work, we know what time it is, more or less. A great contributor to the Internet.

msylor,
@msylor@noc.social avatar

@woody dang, another contemporary lost. Greatest respect for what he accomplished. Took on a hard, under appreciated problem and succeeded.

Time is not simple.

msylor, to random
@msylor@noc.social avatar

@birb https://talkingpointsmemo.com/feed

msylor, to random
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@birb https://talkingpointsmemo.com/

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