phiofx

@phiofx@hachyderm.io

Φ(χ). A unknown function of an unknown argument.

Microblogging about #opensource, #generativeart, #python, #datascience, #physics, #sustainability, #musictheory, #solarpunk, the #fediverse and random combinations thereof.

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

Gargron, to apple
@Gargron@mastodon.social avatar

If continues on this path I’m going to have to switch back to Android. The idea that they deserve a fee from developers for people simply running programs on their operating system is unhinged. The App Store fee is justified because it’s a distribution channel. But whatever this is, is nonsense.

phiofx,

@BigAngBlack @huffles some people say we should prefer android over mobile because its security model is better. Dunno, never really warmed up to it. There is something claustrophobic and disagreeable about the experience, both as user and as developer. I really wish we hadn't wasted decades on it but there was no choice on the matter. This is what oligopolies do to you. They rob your life's options.

mxk, to random
@mxk@hachyderm.io avatar

There is a technology for everyone, where progress goes too far for ones person willingness to adept.
For my grandfather it was programming the VCR.
Have you reached that point already? If so, what technology was it?

phiofx,

@mxk tiktok

zombierustpunk, to random
@zombierustpunk@hachyderm.io avatar

It’s depressing to take stock of the state of the world and see it as smaller than it was ten years, with darker clouds on the horizon. I yearn for a world where people are led by idealism and optimism, instead of cynicism and hate.

phiofx,

@zombierustpunk these two states always coexisted and wage eternal battle for people's minds and souls.

Society is not built by the evil side, but it is effective reacting to evolving conditions.

E.g., the Web was born out of idealism and optimism. But was soon confiscated by greed and exploitation of human weakness.

Which now prompts people to pull their better selves together against tough odds to try to fix it (i.e., ).

Only to be subverted again if we let our guard down. Etc.

SallyStrange, to Economics
@SallyStrange@eldritch.cafe avatar

"Debunking degrowth" or trying to, anyway

"In the degrowth literature, a caricature of the typical economist is presented as believing in unlimited economic growth, and that growth should be pursued regardless of its environmental impact. This is a straw man. It would be a naïve economist who did not recognise that constraints exist. And economists usually limit their projections to a few decades to come, rather than to the infinite future, in which they supposedly believe in unlimited exponential economic growth. Certainly, there are theoretical economic growth models which portray the possibility of exponential growth into the infinite future, but economists have had enough common sense not to assume stylised theoretical models are the be-all-and-end-all when it comes to public policy."

Then why, Mr. Tunny, is it so hard to find an economist who can tell us when the economy should stop growing?

#degrowth #capitalism #Economics

https://www.cis.org.au/publication/debunking-degrowth/

phiofx,

@jackofalltrades @HeavenlyPossum @SallyStrange @pleaseclap @simon_brooke @violetmadder @mwt stupidity is the stuff of humanity. The challenge is when we cover it up (or worse, exploit it for advantage) when we should be admitting the limits of our knowledge and behave accordingly.

gerrymcgovern, to random
@gerrymcgovern@mastodon.green avatar

"Most pollution, most species extinctions, and most habitat destruction are not directly driven by global warming, but rather by industrial agriculture, urban sprawl, mining, overfishing and other forms of direct exploitation, and via other consequences of overshoot."

"Global warming is not the root problem driving ecological collapse. It’s one symptom of the Earth-destroying way of life that characterizes global culture today."

https://maxwilbert.substack.com/p/the-climate-movement-is-making-a

phiofx,

@gerrymcgovern nevertheless I think its important to push current ideas regarding how to tackle climate change as far as possible as soon as possible.

Provided we stick to and demand measurable change (and thus eliminate greenwashing) this process is seeding the knowledge and behavioral toolkit that will enable the monumental further transformations that need to happen.

A sustainable energy system is a necessary but not sufficient condition for reaching full

jonny, to random
@jonny@neuromatch.social avatar

Ppl always understate the labor in scholarly archives by saying "how hard could it be to make a website for hosting PDFs," and then while you are busy explaining "not hard, but the hard part isn't the web tech part, it's ...." NSF Fastlane busts in the door and says "watch how hard we can make it look to host PDFs"

phiofx,

@jonny one day mastodon will render italics and nothing will ever sound the same

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

I don't post much about serious math here anymore. But here's a little piece of category theory connected to music. I dreamt this up thanks to a comment from @skarthik.

In Carnatic music there are 72 seven-note scales called 'Melakarta ragas'. By cyclically permuting the notes of a Melakarta raga you sometimes get another Melakarta raga. This process is called 'graha bhedam':

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

This would give an action of the group ℤ/7 on the set of Melakarta ragas... except sometimes when you cyclically permute the notes of a Melakarta raga you 𝑑𝑜𝑛'𝑡 get another Melakarta raga, since there are constraints on which 7-note scales count as Melakarta ragas. So we only have some sort of partially defined group action. Let's make up a definition:

Let's say a 'partial group action' of a group 𝐺 on a set 𝑋 is a partially defined map

𝐺×𝑋→𝑋
(𝑔,𝑥)↦ 𝑔𝑥

such that:

  1. for all 𝑥∈𝑋, 1𝑥 is defined and equal to 𝑥.
  2. If one of (𝑔ℎ)𝑥 and 𝑔(ℎ𝑥) are defined, then so is the other, and they are equal.

Now the interesting thing is that any partial group action gives a groupoid where

• the objects are elements of 𝑋
• a morphism 𝑔:𝑥→𝑦 is an element 𝑔∈𝐺 with 𝑔𝑥 = 𝑦
• the composite of morphisms 𝑔 and ℎ is their product in the group 𝐺.

This construction is famous for ordinary group actions:

https://ncatlab.org/nlab/show/action+groupoid

but it works fine for partial group actions!

So, there's a groupoid of Melakarta ragas. The Wikipedia article shows that Carnatic music theory is concerned with the connected components of this groupoid: that is, bunches of Melakarta ragas related to each other by graha bhedam.

phiofx,

@johncarlosbaez @skarthik do these constraints reflect some generic feature of our neural network topology? While their precise nature varies from culture to culture, there are always some.

phiofx, to rust

For several years it seemed like deficiencies of older ecosystems will usher new takes: #rust fixing #cpp, #kotlin fixing #java, #julia fixing #python, #wasm fixing #javascript etc.

But it no longer feels so. Maybe it was a case of "you have to move fast to fix things" and as incumbents raise their game the window of opportunity closes. The vast investment in established stacks incentivises patching the most egregious weaknesses.

One exception seems #golang, which found a network niche

Di4na, to random
@Di4na@hachyderm.io avatar

Boomers are numerous. They use 401k. Tons of money go to buying shares. They buy 90% of all of them and never sell.

This is our reality. We rarely talk about it but it is. Not super rich. Your parents. Aunt. Old lady May down the road.

So share price globally always go up. Have always. For 30 years.

Which means middle management results have been wholly unlinked to their performance evaluation for 30 years.

No wonder our corps are totally unmoored from reality.

phiofx,

@Di4na there are probably a few more factors at play, like the complete monetisation of society (in the sense that there is no value system outside money), the complete financialisation (every social relation / obligation becoming a contract that can be bought and sold).

This spreadsheet reality of the MBA lot is totally disconnected from society and environment. The boomer's generation is maybe the historical period this pattern took hold but the design has been at work ever since.

flaviaerius, to python
@flaviaerius@fosstodon.org avatar

One very important factor with a downside for python compared to R: it doesn't allow autocomplete using tab for files and path.

Python will autocomplete only for local variables and functions, while R autocompletes for filenames too.


phiofx,

@numeredevs @flaviaerius which betrays the fact that R is really more a statistical computing system with preferred interfaces (e.g. rstudio) whereas Python is a general purpose language with no such link (ide's ranging from vi to pycharm though i imagine some may be using more exotic setups :-)

amcasari, to snowboarding
@amcasari@hachyderm.io avatar

When should you shovel the snow?

Now (almost always)

When do you want to shovel the snow?

Later (almost always)

When will you shovel the snow?

When it's warmed up, too heavy, and piled up so that it takes 10x longer than it would have if you had done it this morning.

phiofx,

@amcasari how do you cope with the scenario that if you do it now you might have to do it again later (with all the associated loss of face)?

gyptazy, to mastodon
@gyptazy@gyptazy.ch avatar

's memory usage is really insane - in a very positive way! If you have ever played around with you know how much memory you only need for running all the services... / is not only leightwight in code, easy to compile and to set up but also when running and maintaining.

cc: @stefano @grunfink

phiofx,

@gyptazy @stefano @grunfink being written in C its not too surprising that its economical (though by no means automatic... somebody wrote good code :-) but in terms of easy extensibility using low level language has some drawbacks.

leroy, to fediverse
@leroy@indiehackers.social avatar

What would a fediverse forum look like to you?

I know there are some out there, but I'm getting mixed signals about whether it's working or not. Anyone tried them?

phiofx,

@devnull @luceos @leroy @nodebb @multiverseofbadness

The comparison between discourse type forums and reddit/lemmy/kbin is quite interesting in a context. Conceptually they differ on the hierarchy level: single domain versus multi-domain.

In federation that distinction fades, a multi-domain experience can be emulated using a client and multiple servers.

On the other hand reddit/discord became big by making it really easy to start a sub. This is not yet the case for self-hosting

bjmendelson, to random

So what you're saying is, you don't have a business.

You have a bunch of venture funded criminals looking to eventually sucker teacher pension funds and other investors with an IPO and laugh all the way to the bank.

phiofx,

@ErikJonker

Umm, this does not answer the question if they still have a business after they compensate copyright holders (i.e., including all costs and other legal business model requirements)

In the context of the NYT lawsuit it was insinuated they were in discussions which evidently did not pan out.

How a mere algorithm class (such as ) leads to a business is non-trivial. Google could not sell "search IQ" on the basis of their , they sold ads.

@bjmendelson @SandraDeHaan

phiofx,

@ErikJonker

Financial negotiations don't always conclude if the gap is too large to bridge. This may well be the case if one of the two parties thinks it is not viable to pay/receive what the other is able to offer and be still a profit making business.

The legal system being slow creates dubious tech business models with potential expiry date. This is happening belatedly in the data privacy space, with behaviorally targeted adtech on quicksand, at least in the EU

@bjmendelson @SandraDeHaan

davidho, to random
@davidho@mastodon.world avatar

"We put the word 'clean' in front of whatever climate-destroying substance is being sold."

phiofx,

@davidho clean pollution is the future

inthehands, to random
@inthehands@hachyderm.io avatar

For the past year or so, I’ve been using and enjoying the search engine Kagi. Its search results are…fine, no worse than others, and it’s ad-free, stated privacy as a primary goal, and seemed to have a better ethical sense than its competitors.

Or so I hoped.

1/

phiofx,

@inthehands i suspect that just like mozilla and any other niche operator facing the concentration of power and money in bigtech they dont have many options. Money is scarce for wannabee disruptors of the worst cartel in history, existentially scarce.

Not excusing any choices, just pondering the conditions under which they are made.

Imho we are now in a phase where only search-as-public-good can change the status quo. Essentially only governments/states can kill the monster they created.

simon, to random
@simon@simonwillison.net avatar

Classic example of AI-assisted development encouraging me to build things I wouldn't have built without it... I just added tag cloud summaries to my blog's by-year archive pages, e.g. https://simonwillison.net/2007/

I'd already implemented tag clouds as part of my Django SQL Dashboard project, and I had a JSON API that could return the data... so I pasted my old code into ChatGPT along with an example of the JSON and told it to rewrite it to fetch from the new API endpoint: https://chat.openai.com/share/5bbde5a8-0c5b-4bfa-93db-2f83a0bc8846

phiofx,

@simon in the ten minutes saved using AI one can ponder the meaning of , whether they need to exist at all and in what sense they might be an improvement over a nicely ordered table of word frequencies :-)

jonny, to random
@jonny@neuromatch.social avatar

my dogs i cannot lie when i say that i have seriously investigated to the brink of implementation the possibility of doing adversarial metadata manipulation and paper farming under a pen name, the attack surface is the size of the sun https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-03865-y

phiofx,

@jonny the enshitiffication of scientific publishing?

Was not aware of this little bit of trivia though: " They excluded physics authors, who tend to publish large numbers of papers because authorship practices in this field differ from those of other subjects"?

phiofx,

@jonny yes those multi-page author lists are a physics thing (some astronomy work linked to major observatories is similar) but it wasn't immediately obvious how it interacts with the pattern of ever increasing author "productivity". More like a step function than exponential.

In any case if they would filter out large collaboration papers (with more than X authors), I suspect the remainder would be quite similar to chemistry and biology...

Crell, to python
@Crell@phpc.social avatar

I'm trying to setup a #Python app in a container.

It requires gcc...

gcc is giving compile errors on C code when I try to pip install my dependencies.

This is why #PHP is still the most widely used server-side language by a wide margin. 😕

phiofx,

@Crell i was cursing today some versioning hell between , and and out of morbid curiosity I just quickly searched to see what the php ecosystem might look like in this niche... Could the grass be greener? Nah... similar can of worms.

I think managing dependencies is a growing problem across the world

smallcircles, to fediverse
@smallcircles@social.coop avatar

For the question of "Why use ?" has never been answered. There should be clear merits to wade through all the complexity that this choice brings, right?

Yes, its ultra flexible, and you can define your own semantic , and theoretically it could provide a robust extension mechanism to AP protocol. Except that right now it doesn't.

What's the vision of a Linked Data ? What great innovative would it bring, that makes it worthwhile?

phiofx,

@smallcircles @evan @steve the lack of killer app in the / context derives from not having a gee-wow usecase in any context. Bioinformatics is most avant-garde here (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41746-019-0162-5) and whenever there is a delightful surprise in tooling it is motivated by this niche (e.g https://owlready2.readthedocs.io/en/latest/).

If its good enough for physical health it should be good enough for social health but may take a long while to get there.

machias, to random
@machias@hachyderm.io avatar

Does anyone else think it’s weird that the only way we can get people to space is to essentially just explode them up there? Like, maybe we missed a chapter in the “physics of the universe” book or something?

phiofx,

@machias you can explode them slowly, you can explode them fast, but to climb the potential, explode them you must

thomasfuchs, (edited ) to random
@thomasfuchs@hachyderm.io avatar

We could have home-use tests like this—for pennies on the dollar—but we don’t because we have utterly corrupt political leadership having bullshitted everyone for decades, purely for personal gain.

phiofx,

@thomasfuchs the amount of talent and knowledge and resources that exists
today in the world are astonishing.

It takes very effective corruption, trickery, lies and fake narratives to hold us back and perpetuate avoidable misery and suffering.

Let us hope (and work) during the next orbit around Sol towards a more empowered world, with more advance warnings and tests against diseases of all kinds.

amcasari, to math
@amcasari@hachyderm.io avatar

Watching a documentary about infinity last night, my partner and I discovered some fascinating, fundamental differences in how we both see the universe.

His physics-based approach on what is measurable and eventual can be absolutely terrifying tbh.

My mathematics brain expands "what is possible beyond what is countable". I leave room for the infinities between infinities, seeing them as hope and future discoveries.

phiofx,

@amcasari our inability to grasp "infinities between infinities" is likely why it has been quite a while we did not have any major further leap in our understanding of the universe...

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