@j5v@mastodon.social
@j5v@mastodon.social avatar

j5v

@j5v@mastodon.social

Creative geek: maker of music and synths, casual artist, programmer/analyst, wrangler of foundations of physics, fiction writer.

Not related to my day job (tech writer, software developer).

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

MissingThePt, to random
@MissingThePt@mastodon.social avatar

Smoke is now Canada’s leading U.S. export. https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2024/05/13/canadian-wildfire-smoke-minnesota-wisconsin/

j5v,
@j5v@mastodon.social avatar

@MissingThePt Is this another photo showing people enjoying their poor environment? What's the subtext?

Daojoan, to random
@Daojoan@mastodon.social avatar

It's time to expand again. To take back control. To build, not just scroll. No one is coming to save us. This is our choice to make.

How big do you want to be?

https://joanwestenberg.com/blog/the-internet-is-making-us-smaller

j5v,
@j5v@mastodon.social avatar

@Daojoan As a fellow self-hoster, I'm happy to see this.

I want to be in control of my stuff. Platforms/products die quickly on the www, and like you say, they'll squeeze all sides for profit.

Nothing is free; there's always a "yes, but", and 'service' costs real money to run.

purplepadma, (edited ) to random
@purplepadma@beige.party avatar

Do you prefer your battles to use…?

j5v,
@j5v@mastodon.social avatar

@purplepadma You mean I can't dual-wield? If forced to use one: sorcery, because you can make stuff up, and nobody would be the wiser.

SirLich, to gamedev
@SirLich@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

I'm creating a turn based game with random enemy spawns, telegraphed with a sigil on the floor one turn prior.

What do you think about having a few sigils, representing difficulty (minion, normal, elite, boss), rather than making all the sigils unique (or all the same?).

For example if you see en 'Elite' sigil you won't know whether it's a heavyweight (better to stand back), or a lich (better get close to kill quick).

Is this interesting, or just annoying?

#gamedev #godot #godotengine

j5v,
@j5v@mastodon.social avatar

@SirLich How about not making them different initially, then later, depending on character skill, the player sees different symbols.

This does a few things: makes it a skill of the character, not (just) the player. It simplified the game early stages. And if your game has RPG or learned skills, it adds rewarding tactical detail when the player invested in that skill.

mcc, to random
@mcc@mastodon.social avatar

Writing some code that has to represent 90 degree rotations and what I really WANT is for 0 to be 12:00, 1 to be 3:00, 2 to be 6:00 and 3 to be 9:00 but I just KNOW if I do this at SOME point this code is going to intersect with code that does rotations with sin() and then I'll horribly regret not doing 0=3:00, 1=12:00, 2=9:00, 3=6:00

But the trig rotations system just feels so unnatural! :(

j5v,
@j5v@mastodon.social avatar

@mcc ha. And then there's the discovery, "the y is flipped for the graphics engine!" then weird pipeline decisions follow.

mcc, to random
@mcc@mastodon.social avatar

Infinite impulse

j5v,
@j5v@mastodon.social avatar

@mcc infinite frequencies at infinite amplitude, correlated phase.

csilverman, to random
@csilverman@mastodon.social avatar

Curious to see how people interpret this pattern. Is the switch on or off?

(I would have done a poll, but apparently you can't have an image and a poll in the same post.)

j5v,
@j5v@mastodon.social avatar

@csilverman I'm adding to the pile of 'hate' for this UI element.

Consent forms have them, and it's unclear (perhaps deliberately) if they're all defaulted to ON and look like OFF.

I file this under 'dark patterns'.

If you made it this far: how does a screen reader interpret this control?

mcc, to random
@mcc@mastodon.social avatar

Who left this collision geometry all over the floor

j5v,
@j5v@mastodon.social avatar

@mcc Sorry, it was me. I assumed it had flung off to infinity, so was going to ignore it until my frame rate dropped.

jilleduffy, to random
@jilleduffy@mastodon.social avatar

New pottery drop! Pieces are getting better and better. Still much to learn and practice. My favorite part is experimenting with glazes.

An espresso mug with deep ocean blue color glaze on top, followed by white with clay speckles underneath, and an unglazed bottom, held by a handle
A small espresso mug on a table with a brown and blue glaze that has almost a feathered pattern to it, with an ridged handle
A medium blue mug with subtle white streaks and a handle on a ledge with a spider plant and window blurry in the background

j5v,
@j5v@mastodon.social avatar

@jilleduffy Lovely! Reminds me of a set I have, sadly the potter is long retired.

The best part: they're all different.

j5v,
@j5v@mastodon.social avatar

@jilleduffy Yeah, that's what I thought when I saw yours - which is the closest I've seen.

Mine are the work of Speyside Pottery (www says "Thomas and Anne Gough"), and the variety is called "Heather Swirl".

I visited the studio to buy sets around 2007, and they've lasted very well since for the most part. They made custom glazes, and he talked enthusiastically about experimenting with them.

arstechnica, to random
@arstechnica@mastodon.social avatar

Formula 1 chief appalled to find team using Excel to manage 20,000 car parts

Williams team leader may only be shocked because he hasn't worked IT.

https://arstechnica.com/cars/2024/03/formula-1-chief-appalled-to-find-team-using-excel-to-manage-20000-car-parts/?utm_brand=arstechnica&utm_social-type=owned&utm_source=mastodon&utm_medium=social

j5v,
@j5v@mastodon.social avatar

@arstechnica It could be worse. Scrolling through 8000 Cardfile records is hard work.

jwz, to random
@jwz@mastodon.social avatar

Harassing botnets with zipbombs.

The idea is this: instead of just blocking IP addresses that hit honeypot URLs, feed them a compressed document that massively expands on their end, making them run out of memory and crash.

This is extremely...
https://jwz.org/b/ykMS

j5v,
@j5v@mastodon.social avatar

@jwz (years ago) A developer asked me to test the robustness of an image server. I gave it a ~10kB TIF file that expanded to gigabytes and crashed their instance.

johncarlosbaez, to random
@johncarlosbaez@mathstodon.xyz avatar

Some news! I'm now helping lead a new Fields Institute program on the mathematics of climate change.

You may have heard of the Fields Medal, one of the most prestigious math prizes. But the Fields Institute, in Toronto, holds a lot of meetings on mathematics. So when COVID hit, it was a big problem. The director of the institute, Kumar Murty, decided to steer into the wind and set up a network of institutions working on COVID, including projects on the mathematics of infectious disease and systemic risks. This worked well, so now he wants to start a project on the mathematics of climate change. Nathaniel Osgood and I are leading it.

Nate, as I call him, is a good friend and collaborator. He's a computer scientist at the University of Saskatchewan and, among other things, an expert on epidemiology who helped lead COVID modeling for Canada. We're currently using category theory to develop a better framework for agent-based models.

Nate and I plan to focus the Fields Institute project not on the geophysics of climate change — e.g., trying to predict how bad global warming will be — but the human response to it — that is, figuring out what we should do! This project will be part of the Fields Institute's Centre for Sustainable Development:

http://www.fields.utoronto.ca/centres/centre-sustainable-development.

I'll have a lot more to say about this. But for now, let me just say: I'm very excited to have this opportunity! Mathematics may not be the main thing we need to battle climate change, but there are important things in this realm that can only be done with the help of math. A lot of mathematicians, computer scientists, and others with quantitative skills want to do something about climate change. I aim to help them do it.

j5v,
@j5v@mastodon.social avatar

@johncarlosbaez I wrote a blog article, "total environmental cost" a few years ago.

It's a sketch of an idea based on maths, to enable well-informed choices, but I think it's doomed to political failure, because humans will human, even with the best maths and science results.

Republished here in 2020: https://johnvalentine.co.uk/pub.php?art=total_environmental_cost with reference to a similar prior art concept.

vicgrinberg, to random
@vicgrinberg@mastodon.social avatar

#AboutToday

j5v,
@j5v@mastodon.social avatar

@vicgrinberg tap me orange?

sue, to random
@sue@glasgow.social avatar

Men will literally
Develop entire AI platforms
Instead of
Investing in tech writing

j5v,
@j5v@mastodon.social avatar

@sue Yep, I wrote about how silly that behaviour is.

You want to replace [tech] writers with AI? - https://johnvalentine.co.uk/?art=ai_writers

itsfoss, (edited ) to linux
@itsfoss@mastodon.social avatar

Caption this 😜

#linux

j5v,
@j5v@mastodon.social avatar

@itsfoss Page 1: sudo

vicgrinberg, to random
@vicgrinberg@mastodon.social avatar

Morning fog...

j5v,
@j5v@mastodon.social avatar

@vicgrinberg
"Morning fog..."
Fog: "Good morning!"

GottaLaff, to random
@GottaLaff@mastodon.social avatar

My dad, a dr., was an award-winning photographer, but would never take money for his work. He got his photos in National Geographic calendar and other places, won contests, etc, but wouldn’t take a dime.

I’m going through his photos (he took, developed them himself, start to finish), have to get rid of a ton bc we can’t take them to Canada, 100s of mounted 11x14s. I’ll share some soon.

& if you’re very very good, I’ll also share a pic of me at 19 that he took in London. 😊 Maybe even more.

j5v,
@j5v@mastodon.social avatar

@GottaLaff Sorry to hear this, and that nobody can help. I'm not as well-travelled, but mounted my pics for photography competitions. Less than 20 takes up awkward space, and were a pain to move and store, so I started reusing the mounts.

I framed ~4, and will dispose of the rest, as I think they'll not come out again. I went through the same 'disposal' ideas you probably did, and none were viable (e.g. venues didn't want them; wrong format for charities, too much work to sell them online).

aldroid, to random
@aldroid@mastodon.social avatar

i keep pressing ctrl-b but i still can't control bees

j5v,
@j5v@mastodon.social avatar

@aldroid AltGr+B for angry bees.

johncarlosbaez, (edited ) to random
@johncarlosbaez@mathstodon.xyz avatar

If you like numbers don't just study math - study tuning systems in music! Music theory has cool names for individual numbers, like the 'schisma', which is 32805/32768.

Lots of people say they don't like math because they don't like numbers. In reaction, many mathematicians say that math is not really about numbers. Indeed, I don't spend most of my days messing with numbers: I spend a lot of time thinking about shapes, abstract structures, ideas from physics, and so on.

But some mathematicians do love numbers and spend a lot of time on them. I love them as a kind of hobby. The properties of the number 24, for example, are utterly mind-blowing, connecting higher-dimensional spheres to lattices and string theory.

The study of tuning systems offers humbler fun with numbers. If you go up a fifth you multiply the frequency of your sound by 3/2. Do this twelve times and you almost go up 7 octaves. But you're off by a factor of

531441/524288 ≈ 1.01346

This is called the 'Pythagorean comma' - a glitch in the Pythagorean tuning system.

There's also a tuning system called 'just intonation', based on simple fractions as shown below. In this setup if you play the sequence C G D A E C you don't get back where you started: you wind up higher by a factor of

81/80 ≈ 1.0125

This is called the 'syntonic comma' - a glitch in just intonation.

In the 6th century, Boethius noticed that these two commas are close but not quite the same - a kind of meta-glitch between glitches! He called their ratio the 'schisma'. It's

(531441/524288)/(81/80) = 32805/32768 ≈ 1.00113

It's also the ratio between 8 justly tuned perfect fifths plus a justly tuned major third and 5 octaves.

I find this fun!

j5v,
@j5v@mastodon.social avatar

@johncarlosbaez A side quest:

  1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stretched_tuning
  2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piano_acoustics#The_Railsback_curve
j5v,
@j5v@mastodon.social avatar

@mdreid @johncarlosbaez Yes, that makes sense. What I learned from similar explorations is that inharmonic tones (in chords) can be used to deliberate effect, because they are perceived differently from harmonic timbre. Sometimes it desirable to deviate from exact n/m ratios, precisely to achieve phasing, shimmer, buzzing, or dissonance, for example.
I hope to develop my tuning visualiser/editor app to analyse chords for their perceived characteristics.

reginasbread, to random
@reginasbread@homo.promo avatar

I'm so tired of teenagers being "the chosen ones" in fiction. please, let a middle-aged woman save the universe! she's seen some shit and dealt with it. she's tired of it all. she doesn't give a fuck. she's angry. she will get this shit done.

j5v,
@j5v@mastodon.social avatar

@reginasbread Absolutely valid. I've written a woman (MC) on the edge of retirement, and another approaching middle age.

The majority of my MCs are women, in universes that have normalized diversity and representation, and call out any toxicity.

I think teenage MCs are an easy gateway into discovery writing, which is my favourite style. But there's no need to use a teenage MC, unless deliberately targeting teen or young adult markets (which I don't), and aiming for resonance with the reader.

johncarlosbaez, (edited ) to random
@johncarlosbaez@mathstodon.xyz avatar

Did you ever think of music as 2-dimensional?

• Following a red arrow, the frequency goes up by a factor of 3/2 (called a perfect fifth).
• Following a blue arrow, the frequency goes up by a factor of 5/4 (called a major third).
• Following a black arrow, the frequency goes up by a factor of 6/5 (called a minor third).

This setup is used for some keyboards - like on accordions - but it's also useful in '5-limit tuning', where frequency ratios only involve powers of 2, 3, and 5. Just intonation, which I talked about yesterday:

https://mathstodon.xyz/@johncarlosbaez/111170247654517571

is the best known 5-limit tuning system. But there are others!

We often use logarithms to turn frequency ratios into numbers we can add instead of multiply. Since ln(2), ln(3) and ln(5) are linearly independent over the rational numbers, the numbers ln(2ⁱ3ʲ5ᵏ) actually form a 3-dimensional structure: mathematicians call it a free abelian group of rank 3. This chart just shows a 2-dimensonal 'slice' of that.

For example, following the arrows on this chart (which extends indefinitely) you'll never get a note with exactly 2 times the frequency of your starting note. That means you never get a perfect octave! 😿

But you can get as close as you want. And the perfect octave does lurk in the 3-dimensional structure of which this chart is a slice.

j5v,
@j5v@mastodon.social avatar

@johncarlosbaez

I've dabbled with generalised isomorphic tiling for my touch keyboard app, which is fun to abstract in code [illust].

It could work with 'scanline' addressing (Here's my position, what key is this?) or 'potato stamp' addressing (here's my set of keys, where does it go?). I chose potato.

See also:
https://help.lumatone.io/en/creating-mappings/basic-approaches-to-lumatone-mappings or a search for "isomorphic keyboard mapping"

j5v,
@j5v@mastodon.social avatar

@johncarlosbaez I'm on a journey with prime limits, and wrote code to generate ratios within prime limits.

Without severely limiting the powers, the results can become unwieldy. For example [pic], limit 5, exponent 0..3, generates 4096 nonunique ratios for (n, m).

I haven't brought prime limits into my app's UI, because I have more thinking to do before it's practically usable.

j5v,
@j5v@mastodon.social avatar

@johncarlosbaez Lumatone is a significant investment. Linnstrument (square matrix, with expression) less so, but still an investment. Others are on the market (Ableton Push).

If you have a touch screen, you can try this web app to get a taster:

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