@joat@mastodon.scot avatar

joat

@joat@mastodon.scot

DRI sysadmin, occasional Rubyist, and vintage calculator collector with an acute patriotism deficiency.

What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence.

You're not stuck in traffic, you are traffic.

(Un soupçon de français.)

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

joat, to random
@joat@mastodon.scot avatar

The naked cynicism here is shocking. I'll tell you what, multi-billion dollar grocery corporation, how about I (not worth billions of dollars) and you (worth billions of dollars) split this donation in half, and you price it at cost if we're donating it. You're going to claim it as an in-kind charitable donation for tax purposes anyway so that seems more than fair.

Otherwise I'll give my money directly to the food bank and claim the tax refund myself. You money-grubbing scum.

joat, to random
@joat@mastodon.scot avatar

I'm confused by Loblaws. One of their major competitors is Walmart and they somehow still managed to earn the Most Evil Grocery Chain title.

joat, to random
@joat@mastodon.scot avatar

Ok here's my favourite stuff-is-big analogy.

First, try to get a feel for how big the Earth is.

The Sun is over 100 times the diameter of the Earth and it's well over 100 times that distance from us.

Now hold your thumb up at arm's length. Your thumbnail is about the same apparent size as the Sun in the sky. Shrink the Sun to the size of your thumbnail, and the distance to the Sun to the length of your arm. On the same scale the nearest star, Proxima Centauri, is about 130km away.

joat, to random
@joat@mastodon.scot avatar

I made my first actual phone call on my phone in, like, forever, and afterwards Google gave me a popup to review the phone app. Who's running this clown show?

joat, to random
@joat@mastodon.scot avatar

In Canada you can cancel a new phone or contract within 15 days at no charge.

https://crtc.gc.ca/eng/phone/mobile/period.htm

So we don't we all do that, just to mess with them?

Also, wouldn't this flood the market with a bunch of cheaper "refurbished" phones?

joat, to random
@joat@mastodon.scot avatar

1/2

The procedure to get a firmware download for an IBM-rebadged Broadcom-formerly-Brocade device is infuriatingly Kafkaesque. Any worse and I'll turn into an insect.

Search on Broadcom - nope, need login.

Login... nope, not found.

Search IBM. Found! Give me file? No, just a link to Broadcom.

Give me link? No, login.

Log in... give me now? No, enter serial number.

Finally have link.

joat,
@joat@mastodon.scot avatar

2/2

Go to Broadcom link. Give me file? No, login.

Login? No, wait for email verification code.

Fine, login now. Give me file? No, enter serial number.

Give me file now? No, download requires approval. Wait one business day. Fuck you.

Wait one day. Give me file?

No, login.

Login? No, wait for email verification code.

Login. Give me file? No, enter serial number.

Self-inflicted desk-related head injury

joat,
@joat@mastodon.scot avatar

Still not resolved. The first verification didn't work. Tried a completely new account on a different business email address. Finally get approval email to download. Try to download, Broadcom site redirects me half a dozen times through various weird SSO URLs, then says "Permission denied".

Genuinely can't tell whether they are incompetent or malicious.

joat, to random
@joat@mastodon.scot avatar

Silly shell hack I just needed. How do you run "sleep" until a certain time of day rather than for a fixed number of seconds?

sleep $(( $(date -d 13:00 +%s) - $(date +%s) ))

joat,
@joat@mastodon.scot avatar

@djfiander I'm scheduling a reboot for exactly 1pm and want to be able to control-c it if somebody objects. No real reason not to use at

djfiander, to random
@djfiander@code4lib.social avatar

If I bike to work without my fitbit, does it even count?

joat,
@joat@mastodon.scot avatar

@djfiander eating a cookie without logging it also doesn't count

Cassandra, to random
@Cassandra@autistics.life avatar

Channel 2 is the Aquarium Channel.

Channel 3 is La chaîne Aquarium.

It's the same aquarium but different fish.

Just thought the internet should know.

joat,
@joat@mastodon.scot avatar

@Cassandra the aquarium is spread across two channels because it's a Poisson distribution

kaia, to random
@kaia@brotka.st avatar

what's a Linux command to break a very long string a command returns to multiple lines?

joat,
@joat@mastodon.scot avatar

@kaia you want it to word-wrap, word-processing style? New line for every word? Fixed number of characters?

sfwrtr, to Batteries
@sfwrtr@eldritch.cafe avatar

Want some for your post-apocalyptic story? Four years after the pandemic started, 7 out of 7 examined -powered candles had burst batteries. 3 out of 7 had destroyed circuitry and were irreparable. I restored four of the candles to working order with a lot of cleaning and scrubbing, but of course they required fresh .

Takeaway: Nothing battery-powered left for four years will work when found. Much of it will be destroyed.

Bonus: Gasoline has a shelf life and may be useless in 6-12 months. Sorry, no verisimilitude in Mad Max.

and

joat,
@joat@mastodon.scot avatar

@Shanmonster @sfwrtr this is something that The Last Of Us got right. They mention it in passing in Days Gone when you buy fuel for your bike ("this stuff's getting scarce") but I suppose you need to get around quickly for gameplay purposes, and it's only 2 years after the apocalypse.

gparker, to random
@gparker@discuss.systems avatar

My view of the solar eclipse was photobombed by a satellite transit.

© Brant Smith. CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.

video/mp4

joat,
@joat@mastodon.scot avatar

@gparker I've never seen a round satellite before so... 👽

joat,
@joat@mastodon.scot avatar

@gparker maybe unfurled solar panels, in a sort of umbrella arrangement? Or just a big dish?

joat, to random
@joat@mastodon.scot avatar

You know that common sci-fi trope where somebody comes back in time from some post-apocalyptic hellhole future and wanders around amazed at all the shops and products and cars and trains and aircraft? Knowing what climate-induced disasters are coming, I feel like that a lot.

drahardja, (edited ) to UX
@drahardja@sfba.social avatar

The iOS meme that’s going around where “50+50×2=” yields 150 and not 200, is a great example of hidden states in UX design.

Low-cost desktop calculators perform (most) operations strictly left-to-right: press any operator button (+-×÷), and the display is updated to show the result of the calculation so far, and that result becomes an operand for the operation. There is no other state “inside” the calculator that affects the solution—what you see is all you get.

On the iOS calculator, you’re entering the entire expression into a hidden buffer. You can’t really see what you entered (and there’s no option to make it visible, as far as I can tell), and the final result is only shown when you press =. The confusion arises because a user’s mental model may not correspond to the hidden model used for the computation.

All this is to say that hidden states often break expectations. Making hidden state visible goes a long way to remove confusion (see how PCalc does it in the second image).

joat,
@joat@mastodon.scot avatar

@drahardja this feels to me more like the schism between scientific and business calculators. Hardware scientific calculators respect operator precedence because they are built for people who passed math classes, and hardware business calculators (including actual desktop calculators) are strictly left-to-right because they are built for people that failed math classes.

joat,
@joat@mastodon.scot avatar

@drahardja hehe 🙂

The resources thing may have once been true but they still sell both business and scientific calculators (mostly for the education market I suspect) and they still behave the same way. I guess for historical reasons... to match the textbook examples?

I have an HP 17B II, an older model but expensive at the time... and when not in rpn mode it's strictly left to right. It definitely has enough resources for a stack but it behaves like business people expect.

joat,
@joat@mastodon.scot avatar

@drahardja that's a fair point. Very old scientifics didn't show any internal state either, layer models had some sort of "intermediate result" indicator. But I suspect that the presence of ( and ) keys indicated correct expression order, which the iOS calc doesn't have.

I just tried the standard Android calculator and it more clearly shows what's going on, so good on Google I guess.

joat,
@joat@mastodon.scot avatar

@drahardja as an aside, it always bothered me on older scientific calcs that they had a weird semi-rpn style for many functions. So unlike modern calcs where you would enter 1 + 2 × sin( 30 ) = you would instead use sin as a postfix operator and do 1 + 2 × 30 sin =

joat,
@joat@mastodon.scot avatar

@drahardja talking about expectations, I guess the × key on a scientific calculator is understood to mean "do whatever internal magic is required to preserve operator precedence" while on a business calculator it means "= and then multiply by the next number". An = key isn't actually required on a calculator that works that way so it's surprising they didn't save money back in the day by just removing it.

joat,
@joat@mastodon.scot avatar

@drahardja I'd take the argument further... the existence of the = key implies operator precedence in the same way that ( ) do, so any calculator that has either and doesn't respect operator precedence is broken.

joat,
@joat@mastodon.scot avatar

@dm319 @drahardja it's even nicer on the 17B II because it has soft buttons with on-screen labels

greg, to orgmode
@greg@gregnewman.io avatar

In my "play time" with as an user I haven't felt like I trust this app for many reasons. One is that I have installed too many plugins and now it’s overly complicated/bloated - I don't even want to open it. Time to dumb it back down and if it still doesn't stick then keep using . The only reason I've been testing it out is a desire for a better iOS experience with my notes.

joat,
@joat@mastodon.scot avatar

@greg I tried logseq for a while but I kept feeling like something was wrong, then I started hearing stories of it deleting notes to match the database contents and decided it wasn't worth the risk. Also, slow.

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