@kw217@mathstodon.xyz avatar

kw217

@kw217@mathstodon.xyz

Scotland-based Kiwi. Software crafter. Creative polymath and omnivore. He/him. Retoot is not endorsement. Microsoft employee. Any opinions my own.

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

xgranade, to random
@xgranade@wandering.shop avatar

Relatively unimportant tech hot take I will hold onto even in my grave:

XSLT was a good idea, actually, even if it was implemented in brain-hurting ways.

kw217,
@kw217@mathstodon.xyz avatar

@xgranade absolutely - but using XML syntax was the mistake. Pretty much anything else would have been fine, but someone's syntactic astronautics won out and (nearly?) sank the tech.

b0rk, to random
@b0rk@jvns.ca avatar

meet the branch

kw217,
@kw217@mathstodon.xyz avatar

@b0rk awesome! Panel 3 slightly contradicts panel 1 though. True if you turn off GC.

georgebaily, to random
@georgebaily@mastodon.social avatar

What's always amazing about the lobbying/corruption headlines is how CHEAP politicians are. This is like one quarter's marketing budget for a startup. For influencing geopolitics and millions of people's lives.
>Labour MPs have accepted over £280,000 from Israel lobby
https://www.declassifieduk.org/labour-mps-have-accepted-over-280000-from-israel-lobby/

kw217,
@kw217@mathstodon.xyz avatar

@georgebaily you're not going to like the answer - we need to pay politicians a lot more.

phire, to random
@phire@phire.place avatar

Lazyweb once again: I know there are a couple of recent-ish academic or pseudo-academic papers about the bad UX and ergonomics of git and I’m having a hard time locating them, does anyone have the links handy?

kw217,
@kw217@mathstodon.xyz avatar

@phire check recent threads by @b0rk , she's been looking for similar info

ColinTheMathmo, to random
@ColinTheMathmo@mathstodon.xyz avatar

Ok peeps, What's this? Some sort of Chinese vegetable?

kw217,
@kw217@mathstodon.xyz avatar

@ColinTheMathmo it's a choko (pr. choke-oh) - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chayote. They grew like crazy at my parents' place (in Auckland). Not bad steamed, but peel off the prickly skin first. Fairly bland, nice texture though. The leaves are excellent steamed.

whitequark, to random
@whitequark@mastodon.social avatar

today's award for Worst Fucking Waveform Diagram goes toooooo...... CYPRESS!!!

who have this diagram published for HyperRAM writes. it's difficult to read, and for some cursed reason (I know which, you don't need to explain) the latency calculation starts from the middle of the C/A phase, but at least this is sensible...

1/2

kw217,
@kw217@mathstodon.xyz avatar

@whitequark 5 (0). Brilliant. With 4 (-1) and 3 (-2), which at least make a twisted kind of sense.

robin, to random
@robin@mastodon.social avatar

We need to have the conversation that technologists aren't having: how do we make search on the web not be terrible? It's good that Google's monopoly is being investigated, but we need to think about more durable solutions.

It may be less challenging than you'd think.
https://berjon.com/fixing-search/

kw217,
@kw217@mathstodon.xyz avatar

@robin really interesting article, thanks. I think you're missing a key player here though - you look at publisher, search engine, and browser, but the relationship with advertisers is crucial - it's where all the money actually comes from today! Any solution needs to take the financial side seriously across the whole ecosystem.

Yora, to scifi

Something that I am sure lots of writers and gamemasters have thought about:

How bad is it when you get bullet holes in your space ship?

If you can get to safety before pressure drops to 30 kPa, you will be fine. At that point, you might have a minute or two before you pass out.

I found this equation to calculate how long it takes for pressure to drop that far:

Time(s) = [30 * volume(m³)] / hole (cm²)

For a 9mm bullet hole in a 2x2x10 meter corridor, that gives you about 5 hours.

kw217,
@kw217@mathstodon.xyz avatar

@nyrath @Yora @DeltaWye Aloha Airlines 243 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aloha_Airlines_Flight_243
BA 5390 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Airways_Flight_5390

b0rk, to random
@b0rk@jvns.ca avatar

behind "hello world" on Linux https://jvns.ca/blog/2023/08/03/behind--hello-world/

kw217,
@kw217@mathstodon.xyz avatar

@b0rk ls -l /proc/<pid>/fd is interesting - hard to show for a program that instantly returns though.
time python3 hello.py shows the split of execution between user and system, and how they differ from real (because of I/O delays, or concurrent processes)

gsuberland, to random
@gsuberland@chaos.social avatar

spent an hour and a half playing a game. then it crashed and b0rked the savefile and lost all my progress.

so I spent 5 hours figuring out the save file format, extracting the packed streams inside it, learning how Python pickle files work, and patching out the opcodes causing the problem.

game's working again, all saves recovered! and it's 7.20am.

kw217,
@kw217@mathstodon.xyz avatar

@gsuberland obligatory xkcd https://xkcd.com/1319/

hannah, to random
@hannah@posts.rat.pictures avatar

Why do snakes avoid the atlantic

kw217,
@kw217@mathstodon.xyz avatar

@hannah @TerribleMaps

virtuosew, to random
@virtuosew@mathstodon.xyz avatar

I have a challenge before me. The main Amarna pieces consist of two large panels, colour-blocked and "spotted" with embroideries representing stories, finds or people from the book "Nefertiti Lived Here". This will have overlays of gauze showing the heads of Akhenaten and Nefertiti, but importantly, I want the overlays not to touch the embroidery, and to be removable.

So how can I attach the overlays? Or how can I mount them (as unobtrusively as possible, not with a great heavy frame) so that they are easy for the viewer to "open" away, or haul out of the way, or something?

Ideas? Advice? Engineering suggestions?

kw217,
@kw217@mathstodon.xyz avatar

@virtuosew @penguin42 you could glue the magnets to the front of the embroidery board, rather than behind - even recess them into it for neatness.
Alternatively, put the gauze on two panels (split vertically) and mount with hinges on the outside.

luna, to random

me: “hey Siri set a timer for 12 minutes”

iPad in the next room: “okay, 12 minutes starting now”

me, who wanted the timer to be on the phone that’s literally in my hand: “hey Siri cancel that timer”

iPhone in my hand: “there are no timers set”

you can’t make this shit up

kw217,
@kw217@mathstodon.xyz avatar

@luna me: unlock phone, click on clock app, scroll to timer, click reset, set duration, click start. Am I a dinosaur?

whitequark, to random
@whitequark@mastodon.social avatar

does anyone know a technological solution to "hands are too shakey for SMD soldering"? I am thinking of some sort of device you can place your hand on that dampens the tremors
(please RT, would really love for my gf to be able to solder fine pitch SMD stuff)

kw217,
@kw217@mathstodon.xyz avatar

@gsuberland @whitequark random suggestion - would something like the Emma watch help? (caution - prototype only, not something you can buy apparently) https://www.emmalawton.co.uk/press
https://parkinsonsdisease.net/news/emma-watch-wearable-device-tremors

mcc, to random
@mcc@mastodon.social avatar

Alriiiight so Musk finally took a step it didn't even occur to me he'd take. Twitter's gone completely private. You can't see any page unless you're logged in. Not tweets, not profiles. (Embeds still work.) You can't even see whether a profile exists without being logged in.

Or maybe it's a bug? Twitter has literally no messaging anymore even on huge policy changes.

Anyway, I'm giving them until July 30, if they haven't fixed it by then I'm hosting an offsite archive and deleting my Tweets.

kw217,
@kw217@mathstodon.xyz avatar

@mcc last I checked the Twitter archive (the thing you download that has your tweets in it) is a static browsable website? Did they change that?

kw217,
@kw217@mathstodon.xyz avatar

@mcc the great migration, Nov 2022. Looked like I'd need to hide/delete some directories but my public tweets were viewable without accessing anything at t******.com. I can double check tomorrow if useful.

foone, to random
@foone@digipres.club avatar

oh god. I think this data format has an array of relative or absolute offsets.

as in, sometimes they're absolute, and sometimes they're relative. it seems to change from datafile to datafile

kw217,
@kw217@mathstodon.xyz avatar

@foone relative if short, else absolute? Or nothing so sensible?

christianp, to random
@christianp@mathstodon.xyz avatar

I appreciate it's frustrating that the site is slow, but telling me it's still slow won't make me fix it any quicker and won't help my stress level

kw217,
@kw217@mathstodon.xyz avatar

@christianp great writeup, thanks for sharing!

gsuberland, to random
@gsuberland@chaos.social avatar

10: bite inside of lip by accident

20: lip swells up, making it easier to accidentally bite

30: goto 10

kw217,
@kw217@mathstodon.xyz avatar

@gsuberland so true! Ugh.

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