@carapace@mastodon.social
@carapace@mastodon.social avatar

carapace

@carapace@mastodon.social

Weirdo, computer nerd, aspiring ecosystem co-creator, I've lead a strange and unlikely life. I dropped out of high school and was homeless for several years. During that time I learned Reiki, and how to operate and program Linux computers. I decided to get a job as a programmer, so I created a project and presented it at CodeCon 2004. That led to a career as a computer programmer. I'm now semi-retired and I've turned my attention to my other passion: gardening and ecology.

he/him

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carapace, to random
@carapace@mastodon.social avatar

1/7

I love science, so it's strange and frustrating that healing modalities with which I have personal experience (including Reiki, Feldenkrais, NLP, EFT, hypnosis, and others) are "unreproducible" by mainstream scientists, to put it mildly.

carapace,
@carapace@mastodon.social avatar

2/7

> Reiki is a pseudoscience,[1] and is used as an illustrative example of pseudoscience in scholarly texts and academic journal articles.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reiki

carapace,
@carapace@mastodon.social avatar

3/7

> There is no good medical evidence that the Feldenkrais method confers any health benefits. It is not known if it is safe or cost-effective,[2] but researchers do not believe it poses serious risks.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feldenkrais_Method

carapace,
@carapace@mastodon.social avatar

4/7

> There is no scientific evidence supporting the claims made by NLP advocates and it has been discredited as a pseudoscience.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuro-linguistic_programming

carapace,
@carapace@mastodon.social avatar

5/7

> EFT has no benefit as a therapy beyond the placebo effect or any known-effective psychological techniques that may be provided in addition to the purported "energy" technique.[3] It is generally characterized as pseudoscience and it has not garnered significant support in clinical psychology.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emotional_Freedom_Techniques

carapace,
@carapace@mastodon.social avatar

6/7

> The use of hypnosis in other contexts, such as a form of therapy to retrieve and integrate early trauma, is controversial within the medical or psychological mainstream.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypnosis

carapace,
@carapace@mastodon.social avatar

7/7

And so on.

I know from personal experience that the five things I just mentioned are definitely /something/, yet science is blind to them. It's a little odd.

carapace, to random
@carapace@mastodon.social avatar

Have I not mentioned yet that I'm turning 50 this month? Yeah. I'm into it. I'm taking the entire month of May as my birthday.

carapace,
@carapace@mastodon.social avatar

Being fifty years old feels like a super-power.

I don't have to take anybody seriously anymore! Not that I did much previously, just now I'm sure.

The world today is being run by the folks I went to high school with, or who were in high school when I was a lil kid. They have no more clue than i do. And I have like one clue.

It's very freeing.

carapace, to python
@carapace@mastodon.social avatar

(In )

x = 1
while True:
print(bin(x)[2:])
x = x ^ (x << 1)

1
11
101
1111
10001
110011
1010101
11111111
100000001
1100000011
10100000101
111100001111
1000100010001
11001100110011
101010101010101
1111111111111111
10000000000000001
110000000000000011
1010000000000000101
11110000000000001111
100010000000000010001
1100110000000000110011
10101010000000001010101
111111110000000011111111
1000000010000000100000001
11000000110000001100000011
...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sierpi%C5%84ski_triangle

carapace,
@carapace@mastodon.social avatar

@treyhunner Ah, that's lovely. Nice use of deque.😀 👍

baldur, to random
@baldur@toot.cafe avatar

React, Electron, and LLMs have a common purpose: the labour arbitrage theory of dev tool popularity: https://www.baldurbjarnason.com/2024/react-electron-llms-labour-arbitrage/

carapace,
@carapace@mastodon.social avatar

@baldur IT is fashion driven. We're more fashion-driven than the Fashion industry. The field has been expanding exponentially since it was founded, and so the ratio of experienced programmers to newbies has always been very low. And so the hard-won wisdom of the elders is washed out in the glamour and hype.

Management would make coders fungible, but the best coders can change languages/frameworks/etc. quickly so there's a counter-pressure.

carapace, to random
@carapace@mastodon.social avatar

To me the purpose of education isn't to become good little cogs in the machine, or to get a good job ffs. ("Do your homework so you get good grades so you can get a good job." they said. "I don't want a job." I said. "You all seem to hate yours, wtf?") 1/2

wonderofscience, to random
@wonderofscience@mastodon.social avatar

Timelapse of the Falkirk Wheel in action; the only rotating boat lift of its kind in the world.

Video Credit: David Iliff / CC BY-SA 3.0
Further reading: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falkirk_Wheel

Timelapse video of the Falkirk Wheel, with its curved arms cradling water-filled gondolas rotating around a central axis, seamlessly raising and lowering vessels between the joining canals, all under an overcast sky that casts a soft glow on the wheel and the green landscape.

carapace,
@carapace@mastodon.social avatar

@wonderofscience Humans are ridiculous and wonderful

carapace, to random
@carapace@mastodon.social avatar

I have a lil theory that (computer) systems can fail by being too simple, that a certain degree of baroque intricacy helps to lodge a thing in the mind and make it propagate more effectively. E.g. C++ compared to Scheme.

carapace, to random
@carapace@mastodon.social avatar

Nerding out. I was kvetching to my friend Alex (I have one friend, despite being a recluse) about how we have overshot in terms of complexity in modern global society and he was like, you should go read Hero of Alexandria. Huh? Because he was designing all kinds of works back in the day, when life was simpler.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heron_of_Alexandria

carapace,
@carapace@mastodon.social avatar

Now Alex is kind of a genius. I didn't know if it would help but I give him the benefit of the doubt.

The Ancient world was smaller than our modern world, but not less complex at least for the aristocrats, if anything there was more going on. One thing we don't realize is that they had "high" tech back then, including fairly sophisticate calculating machinery.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antikythera_mechanism

carapace,
@carapace@mastodon.social avatar

The Greeks even had a kind of train, filling a role a bit like the Panama canal ~2500 years later:

> The Diolkos (Δίολκος, from the Greek dia διά, "across", and holkos ὁλκός, "portage machine") was a paved trackway near Corinth in Ancient Greece which enabled boats to be moved overland across the Isthmus of Corinth. The shortcut allowed ancient vessels to avoid the long and dangerous circumnavigation of the Peloponnese peninsula.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diolkos

compost, to random
@compost@regenerate.social avatar

Since many seedlings like to volunteer in the worm bins, I wanted to experiment with starting some seeds in a worm bin and using it as a tray.

If the experiment is successful, I will only use the worm bins as seed trays, it is worth the try.

carapace,
@carapace@mastodon.social avatar

@compost Yeah, worm castings almost seem to push the seedlings out and up, eh? I've thrown scraps of live plant in the worm bin to compost only to have them root and grow. It's great stuff!

compost, to random
@compost@regenerate.social avatar

Working with compost piles will show evidence of how toxic our society has become.

Capitalism in the name of profit uses so many chemicals and harmful compounds that are harmful to our health and the planet that we can't control easily the toxic inputs we use in our compost.

This is why harvesting your organic matter and working on creating wild areas for this is a smart idea. You will limit the risks of contamination of your piles.

carapace,
@carapace@mastodon.social avatar

@benben @compost When I was a kid I was taught that every garden and farm should have a wild spot where humans don't go. Habitat for nature spirits.

carapace, to random
@carapace@mastodon.social avatar

I planted the seeds from a dragon fruit, uh, fruit that I got at the grocery store (i had never tried one before) and now I have way too many dragon fruit seedlings. Dragon fruit.

carapace,
@carapace@mastodon.social avatar

@outofcontrol Huh, I don't know. I feel like I've heard it both ways. I'll go look it up later.

carapace, to StarTrek
@carapace@mastodon.social avatar

Once again I'm cleaning out old home dirs and finding lost treasure. I think I cribbed this from Imgur, I didn't make it and I don't know who did, but it's kinda awesome. Share and enjoy!

carapace, to random
@carapace@mastodon.social avatar

Make a glider!? Yes please. From "The Boy Mechanic, Volume 1" (girls can use it too)

https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/12655

MediaActivist, to anarchism
@MediaActivist@todon.eu avatar

Will Aaron Bushnell’s Death Trigger Anarchism Witch Hunt? https://theintercept.com/2024/03/07/aaron-bushnell-fbi-anarchism-extremist/

carapace,
@carapace@mastodon.social avatar

@violetmadder @econads @ophiocephalic @GreenRoc @MediaActivist Yeah, we got rid of the king, but not the slavery and genocide. I believe we have to continue the process of recognizing the full humanity of everybody to atone for those sins. Equality under the law, flowing from our equality in the eyes of the Creator.

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