Albin @albin@scholar.social

Given how many posts about instance admins being involved in, at best, very unproductive beefs is not exactly convincing me that this decentralised moderation concept actually scales. I’m getting the feeling that mastodon is essentially becoming a chaotic web of mini-Twitters now run by people who are unaccustomed to power and therefore ill-equipped for it and often outright dangerous.

(Except my instance admins, who are sweet angels of course)

I'm worried that it seems my rate of discovering new music has slowed significantly, partly because I just don't have anywhere to discover new music I guess. How does one do that, these days?

It's like it's trying to be several different langages and none of them work right because it has to be compatible with Java

At this point I don't even understand the point of Scala

Me: "ok it's weird that really clean functional-style Scala is slightly slower than really cluncy imperative Scala"
Me: "oh so 2.12 has a new compiler let's try that"
My code compiled with 2.12.10: *is even slower*

Why is it so hard to install Windows? Boy they didn’t make it when optical media died!

640k genders ought to be enough for everyone

In this paper we define a bijection between the number of theoretically available genders and the irrational numbers, finally definitely answering the age-old question of "how many genders are there?" with "uncountably many".

#microfic

WHERE IS THE WATER

I have to work in Scala and I've already written three bugs due to comparisons between things of different types giving no errors but unexpected results, including a comparison between `IdealInt.ZERO` and `0`, which is of course `false`, as you would totes expect.

Why aren’t hot dogs served in bagels?

ok ok I’ll show myself out

Java is the most boomer of technologies.

Me: "Oh no I'm really behind on the work on my thesis"
Also me:

I tried out booting @elementary yesterday. Surprised by how many things worked:

✅ HiDPI

✅ Hardware power off

✅ Networking

✅ Font rendering

✅ Scrolling

Things not working:

💀 Ugly grub/terminal boot in tiny font (probably fixable)

💀 Multitouch gestures (maybe fixable)

💀 Stuttering/tearing rendering and delays in menu pop-out etc

Of course I didn’t test many many things (palm rejection, high ram usage performance, suspend/resume, video playback, Bluetooth, external screens, ...).

In principle I really like what some libre OSes are doing (looking at you @elementary); building services and reusable components for common things like email etc, much like Apple does with iOS. I think having one language, one SDK, and components for all the cool stuff has enabled rapid development of apps on mobile and to some lesser extent on the Mac.

Highly recommend this talk from a conference I went to. Basically it discusses the numbers on how programming is moving (it’s very open source), and how the pipeline works (it’s a firehose, and it doesn’t). The focus is towards industry and education, but this has implications for FLOSS as well.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=sGwf2xezk2c&list=PLyrlk8Xaylp6jB7XQ2Zjop6FK1xDumYbX&index=9&t=0s

The US is a third-world country with a very large GDP.

The other day I learnt why there is even a bathroom issue in US politics: apparently US bathrooms are absolute rubbish. This has always confused me.

I never understood how someone could “police” a bathroom even, but that’s of course possible if there is essentially one shared room with stalls separated by virtually no walls, sometimes with gaps around the doors. And they have these in...schools, workplaces, etc, and not just airports and train stations?

I met with my opponent to prepare our mutual thesis defence yesterday. His opening question was “you write ‘ca’ what does that mean?”, followed by a stern reminder that I must write out full abbreviations at first use when I explained (straining to hide my surprise) that it’s an abbreviation for “circa”.

Now worried about what will happen given that he could well start discussing literally anything.