@JorgeStolfi@mas.to
@JorgeStolfi@mas.to avatar

JorgeStolfi

@JorgeStolfi@mas.to

Computer Science professor, State University of Campinas (UNICAMP), Brazil.

Generally leftist (which means socialist outside the US), dreaming of democracy, justice, equality, disarmament, respect for science and human life, green energy, etc.

Posts in Portuguese are about topics of mostly Brazilian interest.

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

JorgeStolfi, to random
@JorgeStolfi@mas.to avatar

What is the proper general term for someone who is bent on imposing their religious beliefs on those who do not share them? Like the Taliban, Iran's Revolutionary Guard, the Spanish Conquistadores, ...

dgar, to random
@dgar@aus.social avatar

My rechargeable batteries are revolting.

JorgeStolfi,
@JorgeStolfi@mas.to avatar

@dgar

But just because they are revolting under the current circumstances it does not mean that they will continue to offer resistance in the future.

JorgeStolfi, to Archaeology
@JorgeStolfi@mas.to avatar

Speaking of the Phaistos Disc, here is a Very Serious Theory about it:

The reason why decipherment attempts have failed is that it is not a TEXT but a DIGITAL AUDIO RECORDING.

Proof: the spacing of characters is roughly uniform over the entire spiral, meaning that, if it is read at a constant symbol rate, it must be spun faster and faster as one approaches the center. JUST LIKE AN AUDIO CD.

If that is not a clinching proof, I don't now what is.

🧵‍>

JorgeStolfi, to random
@JorgeStolfi@mas.to avatar

Perhaps Jack Smith did not request that Trump surrender his passport because he is being closely watched by the Secret Service guys -- who answer to Biden, not to Trump?

JorgeStolfi, to random
@JorgeStolfi@mas.to avatar

I recall, from many years ago, a map of Chinese provinces with color-coded incidence of some type of cancer. The disparities were quite intriguing, and presumably led to the identification of environmental or dietary causes.

Are there similar maps for other diseases with unknown causes, like Alzheimer, Parkinson, other cancers? More generally, is there an "atlas of diseases", ideally with periodic updates?

JorgeStolfi, to random
@JorgeStolfi@mas.to avatar

The huge original innovation of WWW was to allow anonymous FETCHING to information (unlike FTP, which required login to a previously authorized user account at the server.)

However, POSTING of information in the WWW was not meant to be anonymous, since it would be done by the website owner, who could be identified through the official IP registration records.

🧵‍>

JorgeStolfi, to random
@JorgeStolfi@mas.to avatar

I just got one of those calls "dad (sob! sob!), I am your daughter, I just had an accident, I am badly hurt, need money". Only that I have no daughters, oops.

That got me wondering -- how many minutes more before someone combines some LLM generator with voice synthesizer with auto-dialing software with leaked personal info database to place such calls massively and automatically?

EDIT: Already happening, darn! Through @mawhrin :

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/03/05/ai-voice-scam/

JorgeStolfi, to random
@JorgeStolfi@mas.to avatar

In case people haven't noticed, the cesspool formerly known as Twitter no longer has the option to see in Notifications only replies to my posts and citations of my name. Instead it has a "For you" stream that mixes that with unrelated posts that the platform selected by some algorithm.

Amid the incessant stream of bitcoiner spam, it just made me read three tweets by Scott "Dilbert" Adams, complaining that "cancel culture" has "neutered" American "males", and promising a reaction...

JorgeStolfi, to random
@JorgeStolfi@mas.to avatar

YouTube hiked up the Premium subscription to $25/mo.

It would be easier to swallow if they required authors to tag embedded advertisements, and skipped them automatically for Premium subscribers.

Or if they at least demonetized videos with embedded ads.

mythologyandhistory, to philosophy
@mythologyandhistory@mas.to avatar

Did you know that "eat the " was first a concept?

Limitarianism is fundamentally the study of when it might be to put limitations on citizens in a governed society. It's a case-based theory, not a political system.

It asks questions like: is ever individual? What is the wealth limit?

& questions it isn't positing, like: If no one is ultra-rich, should no one be ? Is limitarianism virtue or justifiable without perfectionist views?

Thoughts?

JorgeStolfi,
@JorgeStolfi@mas.to avatar

@mythologyandhistory

I misread "liBERtarianism" and I was about to vehemently protest the mischaracterization of the philosophy.

What a difference a few letters make.

JorgeStolfi, to HashtagGames
@JorgeStolfi@mas.to avatar

Reverse Burger: a slice of bread between two meat patties, with choice of cheese, pickles, murhrooms, tomatoes etc on both sides.


JorgeStolfi, to random
@JorgeStolfi@mas.to avatar

@semiquaver @futurebird @veronica @wynch

Does that mean that you subscribe to those dogmas? Including #6, #7, #8?

JorgeStolfi, to random
@JorgeStolfi@mas.to avatar

Random theory that occurred to me yesterday: poetry must be a rather recent and accidental invention compared to singing.

A poem is a song without melody. I bet that, before the invention of writing, there were no poems, only songs. But when writing was invented, and people tried to write down songs, they of course could not write down the melody. Only the lyrics, rhyme, and some of the rhythm could get through. Voilà, poetry...

JorgeStolfi, to HashtagGames
@JorgeStolfi@mas.to avatar

Vin Diesel, Paul Walker and Michelle Rodriguez
starring in
"Moderately Paced and Even Tempered"


JorgeStolfi, to random
@JorgeStolfi@mas.to avatar

The US must urgently switch from Fahrenheit to Celsius. That alone would drop those obscene daily high temperatures by 60 degrees or more.

JorgeStolfi, to random
@JorgeStolfi@mas.to avatar

I have seen many reports of Trump's failed enterprises, but somehow this one was never mentioned. I would say that it is the most "educative" one, and should be the first of the list:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XQM1m_In5n0&t=13s

JorgeStolfi, to random
@JorgeStolfi@mas.to avatar

Inkscape has a quadratic-time algortithm bug that makes it take hours, or just crash, on certain moderately large files:
https://gitlab.com/inkscape/inkscape/-/issues/4281

Sadly the developers don't seem to care about that...

JorgeStolfi, to HashtagGames
@JorgeStolfi@mas.to avatar

Because if you pick up the phone and say"sorry, I am not home right now" the caller may perhaps suspect that you are lying.


JorgeStolfi, to random
@JorgeStolfi@mas.to avatar

After the embarrassments created by Princess Di, Meghan Markle, and the Epstein girls, the MI6 secretly determined that all sexual, romantic, or marital partners of British Royals should be CGI-generated virtual persons. The recent Kate Middleton incident was just a glitch due to upgrade of the OS at the MI6 secret datacenter at Portmeiron, Wales.

JorgeStolfi, to HashtagGames
@JorgeStolfi@mas.to avatar

A decentralized communications technology that does not depend on routing digital packets through a physical network of towers, gateways, microwave beams, and optical fibers. The text to be transmitted is encoded with a multiband frequency/amplitude modulation scheme, transmitted by molecular density waves, and decoded with a pair of miniaturized spectral filter banks implanted under the receiver's skull. Range up to tens of meters.


JorgeStolfi, to random
@JorgeStolfi@mas.to avatar

The Secret Service claimed that all their messages sent on Jan/6 had been permanently and completely erased from all their phones.

But that was before they handed over those millions of "documents" to Jack Smith's grand jury, wasn't it? Have they miraculously found those deleted phone messages?

JorgeStolfi, to SpaceX
@JorgeStolfi@mas.to avatar

SpaceX said that the second test of Starship's Super Heavy Booster lasted the full planned 6 seconds and all engines lit up (at half-power) but two shut down prematurely.

However, the video of the test shows ignition at about 5:23 seconds and shutdown before 5:27 seconds. Another "Musk Approximaiton"?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kUPEvJqfuzU&t=323s

JorgeStolfi, to random
@JorgeStolfi@mas.to avatar

Amy Castor and @davidgerard report on the Texas coalition against wasting 1.7 GW of power from the grid at obscenely subsidized prices, thus extending the life of fossil fuel burning stations, and 1.4 M gallons of cooling water per day while Texans are asked to conserve water, in order to lose investors' money by operating the biggest ponzi and money laundering network ever: https://amycastor.com/2023/10/23/texans-versus-bitcoin-jackie-sawicky-and-the-texas-coalition-against-cryptomining/

JorgeStolfi, to random
@JorgeStolfi@mas.to avatar

Is this normal? All my life I directly remembered only a handful of years of my personal events. Like my birth year (1950), when I started college (1969), when I married and moved to the US (1979), when I moved from Xerox PARC to DEC SRC (1985), when I came back to Brazil (1992) and a handful more after that. For all other events -- when I got my PhD, became head of Dept, moved to current home, etc -- I always had go start from one of those dates and count the years, every time. ...🧵‍>

JorgeStolfi, to random
@JorgeStolfi@mas.to avatar

Amendment 14 to the US Constitution applies to "officer of the United States, or under any State" in general, but then lists explicitly several posts, namely "Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice-President" and "a member of any State legislature, or [ ] an executive or judicial officer of any State".

Notably absent from the explicit list is "President or Vice-President", as well as "Governor or Vice-Governor". 🧵‍>

  • All
  • Subscribed
  • Moderated
  • Favorites
  • •
  • JUstTest
  • cisconetworking
  • thenastyranch
  • GTA5RPClips
  • everett
  • Durango
  • rosin
  • InstantRegret
  • DreamBathrooms
  • magazineikmin
  • Youngstown
  • mdbf
  • slotface
  • ethstaker
  • megavids
  • kavyap
  • normalnudes
  • modclub
  • cubers
  • ngwrru68w68
  • khanakhh
  • tacticalgear
  • tester
  • provamag3
  • Leos
  • osvaldo12
  • anitta
  • lostlight
  • All magazines
    •