petrichor

petrichor, 1 month ago to random

I made a thing! It's very work-in-progress and grew out of my own experience of autistic discovery but I thought it might be of some interest or use to others.

The Missing Manual for a Neurodivergent Brain
https://book.neurospicy.town/

petrichor, 2 months ago to random

Finally got round to pulling the plug on my single-user Matrix server. It was on Debian 22.04-LTS so not affected by the xz thing AFAIK, but I haven't used it actively for ages and this was a good kick for me to get all the data off it and shut it down so it no longer cost me money every month.

petrichor, 2 months ago to random

I need new t-shirts! What are your recommendations for places to get cool geeky t-shirts that are also nice and soft on my sensitive autistic skin, and ship from the UK or EU so that shipping doesn't double the price?

moanos, 3 months ago to random

Dear #LaTeX bubble: I want to make a index of an index in a formula. How would I do that? 🙈

I tried x_i_j which did not work

petrichor, 3 months ago to random

#SilentSunday

sam, 5 months ago to random

Are there any open-source (but with a hosted version for free or paid) library cataloging programs?

petrichor, 5 months ago to random

Naming things is so powerful. I recently learned about the concept of "Cruel Optimism" coined by Lauren Berlant.

I haven't read up much on it yet, but my naive understanding so far is: "optimism" as in "you could be safe/healthy/happy/etc if you just do X"; and "cruel" because it fails to acknowledge the very barriers to being safe, healthy, happy etc. are also barriers to "just doing X".

jonny, 5 months ago to RSS

I guess this is turning into a real project so putting this out there if anyones interested:

We're making a very lightweight tool to create RSS feeds for journals from crossref metadata (with room for other sources). If ya dont know, many publishers are shutting down their RSS feeds to drive people onto their surveillance platforms, and every enshittification leaves behind an opening for adversarial interop.

This opens some interesting possibilities like creating feeds for keywords indexed across journals to start breaking down journals as the major organizational scheme of scholarly lit - papers have metadata keywords, but they mostly arent used, so lets use them!

Eventually wed like to write a FastAPI plugin similar to activitypub-express so we can make all feeds available on the fedi as well, and that would be a really nice set of tools to build for smaller AP projects that dont necessarily want to be full instances.

This is designed to be extremely deployable so you can run your own feed generator, but we'll also host a reference instance here at feeds.neuromatch.social once we get it running.

Just getting started, help wanted and welcome from anyone who loves #RSS and reading papers ♥

Repo: https://github.com/sneakers-the-rat/journal-rss

Cc @lili and @roaldarboel

Stems from this thread: https://neuromatch.social/@jonny/111668885237921256

brainwane, 5 months ago to random

It's interesting to contemplate fictional characters who would be good or bad waiting room companions at the doctor's office.

Probably good: Jane Eyre, Simone from The Good Place, Data or Chakotay from Star Trek, Dr. Rivers from Regeneration, Murderbot

Probably bad: Chidi from The Good Place, most of Zen Cho's protagonists, Beckett Mariner or Q from Star Trek, Randy Waterhouse for most of Cryptonomicon, Siegfried Sassoon in Regeneration, pretty much everyone in The Great Gatsby

jonty, 5 months ago to random

I cannot get over this salesdude filing a Freedom of Information request with THE BRITISH LIBRARY asking if they have "any paper documents in storage"

petrichor, 6 months ago to random

It really bothers me that all the people pushing "lean" approaches to this and that (especially public services) seem to forget that body fat isn't waste, it's vital reserve capacity for times of crisis as well as insulation during the cold months.

It shouldn't come as a surprise that services like public health, education, libraries, social care whose reserve capacity has been reclassified as waste and cut away are now struggling to deal with global pandemics, cost of living struggles, etc.

petrichor, 6 months ago to random

Where can I get some cool geek stickers for my laptop with profit going to someone who needs it? Feels like the only options right now are redbubble or etsy who charge sellers big fees and have many sellers just making money selling others' free designs.

I could pick some up at conferences but don't really get to go to any "proper" developer confs right now as they're not close enough to my work that I can get paid to attend and for all that I'm comfortably off I can't afford to self-fund.

petrichor, 6 months ago to random

Time to pick a language for this year's #AdventOfCode! I am torn between:

1. Haskell, because it's still my favourite language and I rarely get to use it
2. Some sort of Lisp, because I really want to learn a dialect more widespread than elisp
3. Python, because it's the one I'm most familiar with plus will be something I can demo to colleagues learning it

petrichor, 7 months ago to random

So, y'know Cloudflare's "it wasn't me!" page when they're sitting between you and an unavailable web page, where they manage to disclaim any responsibility for the problem, point the finger at their customer (the website) and advertise their service to a group (web users) to whom they're otherwise largely invisible?

I feel like we could learn from this play in libraries...

gvwilson, 7 months ago to random

"Software Design by Example" (https://third-bit.com/sdxjs/, https://third-bit.com/sdxpy/) frequently shows individual methods from a class in separate blocks with explanatory text between them. How can I do this in Quarto? Do I have to put the code in a separate file and use an extension to include only demarcated lines (or include by line number)? Or can I put the entire class in a single invisible block and transclude portions in visible code blocks (my preference)?

fribbledom, 8 months ago to random

Programming is like sitting on a swing going back and forth between

"I'm a coding genius"

and

"I'm the biggest idiot alive"

Neverfadingwood, 8 months ago to random

Just seen a new favourite response to AI text. "Why should I bother to read something nobody could be bothered to write?"

petrichor, 8 months ago to random

Dog-havers with campervans or commercial vehicles: a question for you...

Is there a solution for clipping a dog harness into a Securon seat belt clip? We have a "universal" one that fits the more standard clips in the front seat but would want a dog to be in the back for everyone's safety.

This is the type of thing we already have https://www.petsathome.com/shop/en/pets/pets-at-home-universal-car-seat-belt-dog-restraint

evan, 8 months ago (edited 8 months ago) to random

Can you tell if someone muted you?

#EvanPoll #poll

petrichor, 9 months ago to random

One of the things that really bugs me about Slack and Discord is the way they are fractally divided into workspaces/servers and channels so that I constantly have small numbers of unread messages spread across many channels, and many more that are functionally dead but still clutter up the interface because I don't want to miss if someone does post there.

It also creates additional mental load, because anything I want to share requires a multi-level decision about the most relevant channel.

TerrorBite, 9 months ago to random