@TomSwirly@toot.community
@TomSwirly@toot.community avatar

TomSwirly

@TomSwirly@toot.community

.uk ➡️ .at ➡️.ca ➡️ .nyc ➡️ .nl

Check out my silly little bot here: https://botsin.space/@fortune

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lauren, (edited ) to random
@lauren@mastodon.laurenweinstein.org avatar

Large tech firms these days with lax security don't seem to ever pay a significant price for the hassles caused to their users when user data breaches occur. Perhaps if the CEOs of these companies were held directly responsible in a more direct way, they'd work harder on their security systems. What should be done with these CEOs?

TomSwirly,
@TomSwirly@toot.community avatar

@lauren That was a hard one. Public flogging is more fun, jailing is more effective.

microtones, to AmbientMusic
@microtones@mastodon.social avatar

something very recent for Bandcamp Fri., check out my current piano musical direction...

https://davidbeardsley.bandcamp.com/album/blue-in-blue-in-blue

#microtonal #microtones
#xenharmonic #ambientmusic

TomSwirly,
@TomSwirly@toot.community avatar

@microtones I have a new job starting Monday and I got an unexpected tax refund, so you better believe I'm going to catch up with you and complete my Beardsley collection, as well as purchasing all of Daevid Allen's work (I have a bunch but it's mostly copyright violated, not my fault!) and some others.

Greetings from Rouen, a lovely little town with terrible weather but lots of good energy and very affordable housing!

Meanwhile, back in Amsterdam, https://nltimes.nl/2024/05/02/amsterdam-parking-spot-goes-market-eu495000

atomicpoet, to random
@atomicpoet@atomicpoet.org avatar

This might sound silly, but for video games, I’d rather have 800p at 60fps than 4K at 30fps.

Once you get used to 60fps and higher, 30fps drives you up the wall. You’d think it wouldn’t matter since movies typically run at 24fps, but it really matters with video games where reaction time is so important.

TomSwirly,
@TomSwirly@toot.community avatar

@atomicpoet Human reaction time to visual stimuli is ~250ms. In 24fps, one frame is 41ms; at 60fps, one frame is 17fps.

So the maximum delay in seeing an event between these two speeds is 24ms, or about 1/10 of human reaction speed.

Many musicians can perceive time errors down below that level, though...

TomSwirly,
@TomSwirly@toot.community avatar

@atomicpoet Alas, in order to save my hands, and my spare time, I long ago gave up addictive games which make heavy use of my manual dexterity!

Go is the only game I play online these days; I do play fairly fast, but not at the speed where milliseconds make a difference.

A 24ms delay would be noticeable when playing music, though you'd compensate (the delay between actuating a note and hearing it can be far greater than that): it doesn't seem unreasonable that it'd affect game play.

timClicks, to random
@timClicks@mastodon.nz avatar

An short comparison between Python and Rust for text processing tasks. (An efficient algorithm is left as an exercise for the reader. 😅 ) https://youtu.be/3-odyhxzWkE

TomSwirly,
@TomSwirly@toot.community avatar

@timClicks

from string import ascii_uppercase as upper, ascii_lowercase as lower

SWAP_CASE = str.maketrans(upper + lower, lower + upper)
assert 'No Gods, No Masters'.translate(SWAP_CASE) == 'nO gODS, nO mASTERS'

(Tested for correctness...)

DrALJONES, to random
@DrALJONES@mastodon.social avatar

Analysis: recent poll on voter intentions

About half of all voters would replace both candidates on the ballot.

62% of Biden-supporting voters would replace Biden.

Voters have little confidence in either Trump or Biden, including re fitness for office, personal ethics & respect for democratic values.

Pew research shows 49% of registered voters favor Trump, while 48% support Biden.

https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2024/04/24/in-tight-presidential-race-voters-are-broadly-critical-of-both-biden-and-trump/?utm_source=Pew+Research+Center&utm_campaign=0c78f7e640-Weekly_4-27-24&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_-0c78f7e640-%5BLIST_EMAIL_ID%5D

..

TomSwirly,
@TomSwirly@toot.community avatar

@DrALJONES The D/RNC have completely blocked any other choice. Perhaps the Hand of Fate might sweep one or both of these pieces off the board.

> 49% of registered voters favor Trump, while 48% support Biden

I fail to understand why even one human who isn't Trump would support this man.

TomSwirly,
@TomSwirly@toot.community avatar

@DrALJONES NO!! Not Biden, but Trump! 😲

I mean, as a socialist and a pacifist I am very, very much not a fan of Biden, but compared with Trump?!

Trump comes off as an unhinged rambling psychopathic narcissist!.If you saw him on the street, you'd expect him to come after you with a knife, smelling of human waste.

The States will not survive United if Trump wins. Yes, one tiny irrational accelerationist part of my mind say, "Those belligerent Yankee fsckers deserve it," but I repudiate it.

TomSwirly,
@TomSwirly@toot.community avatar

@DrALJONES Man, somehow I managed to enrage someone with this post by not being extreme enough!, they wrote a long screed and then deleted it.

To make it clear, Biden is against most of what I stand for, but isn't a deranged maniacal psychopath who hates even more of the things I care about.

If I could press a button and remove them both, I'd do it now!! Heck, if I got to keep that button indefinitely, things would be very different for the evil old USA.

StillIRise1963, to random
@StillIRise1963@mastodon.world avatar

On its face, what fucking sense does ticketing people who can’t afford a home make.🙄

TomSwirly,
@TomSwirly@toot.community avatar

@StillIRise1963 The supposed theory is simple - if you maltreat homeless people enough, they will magically figure out some way to not be homeless to avoid being tortured further.

Of course, almost no one becomes homeless by choice; and stress makes you stupid, not smart.

The real explanation is that in order to avoid thinking "There but for the grace of God go you and I," the architects of all this mess want to dehumanize their victims as much as possible.

DrALJONES, (edited ) to FreeSpeech
@DrALJONES@mastodon.social avatar

The issue of free speech on campus

Christian Parenti & Norman Finkelstein

Well worth watching - thoughtful & nuanced views on a difficult issue.

How can marginalised voices best protect themselves from loud money?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OoSmAtVN19Q

Finkelstein at 25min

#FreeSpeech #USPol ..

TomSwirly,
@TomSwirly@toot.community avatar

@DrALJONES Seems like bullshit to me. Punching down is nothing like punching up.

TomSwirly,
@TomSwirly@toot.community avatar

@DrALJONES You have so far posted well here, so I am willing to believe you!

I'd read a transcript, but YouTube videos on serious subjects don't work for me for several reasons, mainly because when I read serious material I read some parts very fast and other parts very slowly, and often stop just to think. (Also, now that we're peripatetic my wife has to hear everything I listen to...)

TomSwirly,
@TomSwirly@toot.community avatar

@DrALJONES

I should start by saying that I'm seriously regretting my initial flip remark, based on having had too many free speech absolutists in my life. 😀

I have considerable respect for Professor Finkelstein, who generally speaks for me on most matters

I know there's a transcript in YouTube, but pasting it elsewhere hasn't resulted in readable prose for long texts: with timestamps, everything's in tiny uniform chunks, without, the text comes in blobs with random carriage returns.

futurebird, (edited ) to random
@futurebird@sauropods.win avatar

"The Why Files" is a youTube channel that regularly has videos with over a million views. They started as a kind of paranormal/fringe science channel that was mostly harmless, and that often debunked conspiracies.

But, they've moved beyond that in to material such as suppressed patents for cars that run on water. And treating climate change like it's a unresolved question. This has made their audience grow.

The things is they aren't just spitting lies. 1/

TomSwirly,
@TomSwirly@toot.community avatar

@futurebird

> For example cars can run on hydrogen and one can make hydrogen through electrolysis of water.

But that cannot ever lead to "a car that runs on water". It takes more energy to electrolycize water into hydrogen and oxygen than you will get by burning the hydrogen because of the Second Law of Thermodynamics.

The idea of a car running on water is simply wrong.

TomSwirly,
@TomSwirly@toot.community avatar

@futurebird

grrrRRR...

I have had too many friends who were completely into these things, and my cousin went off into this for no reason a few years ago, he's 60 and a university professor!

He also was telling me how the UFO people were going to be revealed "this year" - that was in 2020...

pvonhellermannn, (edited ) to climate
@pvonhellermannn@mastodon.green avatar

Just listened to @rahmstorf’s enormously helpful &clear Alfred Wegener Medal lecture:

“Is the Reaching a Tipping Point?”

Answer: it looks more and more likely. There are still uncertainties, especially as to “When”; but with ever increasing evidence it is clear, as Rahmstorf says: we must, must apply the .

During sobering conclusion a pop-up message about Taylor Swift. What a time to be alive.

https://meetingorganizer.copernicus.org/EGU24/sessionprogramme/5215#

TomSwirly,
@TomSwirly@toot.community avatar

@pvonhellermannn @clarebee Living in the Netherlands, and now France, I get a lot more of a feeling that "the people in charge" are actually concerned with the welfare of the average guy than I ever did in the USA or the UK.

kissane, to random
@kissane@mas.to avatar

A few weeks back I encountered a FOSS guy here explaining that when he sees open source devs ask for money, he blocks them and then stops using their code because they're morally wrong and he only wants to work with tools made by people who are doing the work for the right reasons. (I'm paraphrasing to avoid indexing the post.)

I've resisted writing about it because I'm slammed, but the question I can't shake is: Who benefits from the ideology of "pure" volunteerism?

TomSwirly,
@TomSwirly@toot.community avatar

@kissane A possibility that no one seems to have considered is that this person is a troll, aka a low-level sociopath, who doesn't actually do what they pretend to do.

It's very hard to find a significant open source project which doesn't involve some people accepting money for spending their time to improve software for the common good.

For example, what language does the troll program in? Not C, C++, Python, JS, Ruby, ....

faab64, to Israel

Some 52 years ago, when I was in 4th grade of primary school, I found a book "who put glasses on the kid's eyes" in a small book shop in open bazaar of my hometown Ahvaz in khuzestan province of Iran.

A few days later, we had to bring a book to school and read it in front of the class. Happy as I was to have found a great book, I took it to school and read it in front of the class.

I couldn't understand why my teacher was acting so scared and stopped me before I had finished the book and sent me to the principals office.
I was nervous, didn't know what I had done wrong and our principal, who was a really nice man, and went to the same university as my oldest sister took the book and asked me where I had bought it. I knew something was wrong, so I said I bought it at the book store of our local mosque, to protect the guy who was my source of cheap and lovely books and would buy back my old ones to help me afford buying new ones.

In the evening my father came home, agitated and clearly upset. Asked me what I have done and I explained the situation, including the fact that I lied about wher I had bought the book. Told him the highlight of the book about a happy child who was living in a town with happy people who were all wearing glasses.

He was seeing flowers, colorful houses. Nice people and happy children all around him, birds flying in the sky and everyone were so friendly to him.

Until one day he fell of and his glasses broke. He couldn't believe his eyes, the flowers, colorful houses and happy people were all gone. All he could see was a run down city, with piles of garbage everywhere, people wearing worn out clothes, looking hungry and sick.

He was nece happy after that, he couldn't believe that everyone were walking around with glasses and we're happy all the time. But he was sad and miserable, because he had seen his town without those glasses.

Anyway. My father took me to a building close to the main police station on the other side of the Karun river, he spent almost entire day in a room where I could people screaming at him and a few times someone his the table very hard. But couldn't hear what they were saying.
My dad came out. Pulled my hand without saying a word, we walked for an hour to get home, didn't take taxi as we used to do.

He didn't say a word during the whole day and told me to go over my books and bring all the books I had bought from that shop, he through them in a metal bucket and poured some fuel over it, set them on fire and waited until they were completely burned, mixed the ashes to turn them into dust, filled the bucket with water and through it in the toilet.

He told me to never go back to that shop and be careful to take any books to school from now on.

That' was my first interaction with the notorious Savak police of Shah of Iran. In the next days, all the 4 book stores in our town were raided. Books confiscated and doors locked. Never heard about any of them again.

Reading the comments of pro Israeli accounts on mastodon reminded me of that book and that experience that changed my life when I was only 8 years old.

This post specially triggered those memories. Unlike the kid in my book and the people living in the town, these people know very well tat what they are posting is not true, they have seen the horror of the past 76 years of occupation, they have seen the 66 times they were subject to UNSC charges, and 45 that were vetoed by the US..

But they don't care, they see themselves as victims. They don't see the millions of starving palestinians, or the millions living in refuge camps around the world as worthy of their empathy or cause of why Palestinians and some of the world is fed up with their out of control criminal behavior

They don't have glasses on their eyes, they have chosen to be selective and above the laws of the world.

#Israel #Iran #UNSC #Hypocrisy #Revisionism #Rant #Memories #Politics #Inhumanity

@palestine @israel

TomSwirly,
@TomSwirly@toot.community avatar

@faab64 @palestine @israel

My father visited Persia at around that time. Later, when the "hostage crisis" happened, he was singularly silent about it, even though he was politically conservative.

When I asked him, he said that no matter how bad the Ayatollah's secret police were, he could never possibly be as bad as Savak.

He didn't tell me any more, and now he's gone and I can't ask him.

cstross, to random
@cstross@wandering.shop avatar

WHERE THE WEB IS GOING: The convergence of LLMs and web advertising will lead to "ads" consisting of several hundred gigabytes of javascript containing a (weighted) neural network designed to generate unique per-user video advertisements—generated on your computer at your expense to ensure the imagery is unique and evades AI-based ad-blockers.

"AI spam" is an entire AI, squatting on your CPU and making it glow dull red as it works out how to capture your attention.

Welcome to the spamularity.

TomSwirly,
@TomSwirly@toot.community avatar

@ianturton @cstross It's the sequel to that book, "The Merchant's War"

TomSwirly,
@TomSwirly@toot.community avatar

@cstross @ianturton

I assure you, it is.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Merchants%27_War_(Pohl_novel)

In one of the earliest scenes, Tennison Tarb gets hit by the most advanced form of advertising and becomes hooked on Moka-Colas. He gets more and more hooked - there's a nasty scene where he tried to deny that he ordered some large number of these drinks, and is shown his signature on each purchase.

Later he goes through a horrifying detox, phase one of which is described in great detail, and he is repeatedly told...

1/

hart, to random German
@hart@norden.social avatar

Nein danke

Bruno Burger, ...mit erneuerbaren Energien geht alles gerade in die richtige Richtung

TomSwirly,
@TomSwirly@toot.community avatar

@hart Mindless propaganda against atomic power is one of the many reasons why fossil fuel use has continued to grow exponentially for the last century. And now it's too late.

Note that France has managed to mostly decarbonize - by using nuclear power.

Germany got rid of its nukes: and now has the most CO2 emitting power in. Europe.

Congratulations! You help destroy our ecosystem.

TomSwirly,
@TomSwirly@toot.community avatar

@samuelmumm @hart I eagerly await your reasoned refutation, then.

TomSwirly,
@TomSwirly@toot.community avatar

@Blahster @unnameduser @samuelmumm @hart

The devastation from fossil fuels will last for the rest of time.

To be honest, I no longer think nuclear power can save us: it is too late. We would have had to have gone nuclear in a big way two generations ago, giving us enough breathing space to retool our society for degrowth.

The environment movement concentrated on nuclear power and sidelined the much bigger threat of fossil fuels until it was too late.

1/

TomSwirly,
@TomSwirly@toot.community avatar

@unnameduser @Blahster @samuelmumm @hart

But the highest funding for fusion research came during the cold war:

http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2021/ph241/margraf1/

TomSwirly,
@TomSwirly@toot.community avatar

@samuelmumm @hart @unnameduser Again, the final storage for fossil fuel waste is our atmosphere. Each year the CO2 emitted by our society increases. We would have needed every possible source of non-emitting energy to mitigate this. This is why it's so unfortunate that activists have systematically concentrated on killing nuclear power for the last fifty years.

TomSwirly,
@TomSwirly@toot.community avatar

@samuelmumm @hart @unnameduser @Blahster While this is a fair criticism, you will note from that previous graph that expenditures on fusion research dropped by about 85% in just a few years, whereas predictions were based on continuing funding levels for fusion research.

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