The primary problem I had with mastodon, a project I believed in and worked towards and spent a lot of time with several accounts on different instances, was constant bickering about what other instances to defederate/ban. Constantly! "Oh this instance didn't ban this other instance we banned, ban!"

I am now seeing posts saying that Bsky is effectively banning all NSFW content with the TOS change. Stop playing telephone with your know-nothing mutuals, this isn't true! When a site makes a *big* TOS change they want the users to know so they follow it, Tumblr did not sneak in its porn ban.

I see an artist has made a post calling these changes MASSIVE and those pushing against it by saying it's already in the TOS are spreading misinformation and I think that's kinda a poor read of the situation. For one thing the post looks totally conspiracy brained, not helping even if true.

Not to bang on about this but... this was in the previous community guidelines too. And the one before. And the one before. I don't think they just ever enforced it? Still think it's bad, but this isn't a new thing.

I'll concede that killing Belos in The Owl House was very cathartic. Maybe people don't actually have a problem with the worse-than-death endings for fascists like what the diamonds got and instead they subconsciously worry about old villains being reused if they don't die.

One of the themes of the Star Wars Prequels (especially Clone Wars) that I think is really prescient is people caring more about proper punishments for the bad guys than democracy leading to fascism. I think this is important in regards to the constant "why didn't my fav kids show kill everyone??"

I also don't think any deathbed conversion of a character should count as redemption if we're doing this discourse again. Killing a fascist character off and making them say "I was wrong you were right all along" immediately before it happens sounds good actually.

I don't think that the diamonds being put on a leash for the rest of eternity is "redemption" and I'm tired of any SU discourse that frames anything other than death as "redemption." This old gross maximalist reading of everything isn't helping.

Also given recent developments I'd like to clarify that my previous hot takes on adding engineering classes to humanities degree programs was predicted on those programs being inherently valuable and worth continuing.

I am going through LeetCode day by day to better learn ruby. It is interesting coming through the pipeline like this, all the material is geared towards learning theory but I write theory already! Doesn't mean I can tell you if any? or values.any? is a faster way to search a hash intuitively.

I'm a special boy who needs special prescriptions.

This is me saying that I, as a CS grad student with a pretty good grasp on writing, could probably blab my way through a single 300s level HIST/LIT/PHIL* class. A humanities grad student would choke on the first electrical eng class. Maybe they could get through civ eng surveying if they use stats.

I've become more skeptical of the notion that what's needed is more humanities education for engineers, I don't know of any engineering program at a major university that does not require some ethics and history classes. No university requires their humanities students to take an engineering class.

Making everything immutable is only functional programming in functional programming languages otherwise it's only sparkling side effect avoidance.

As a CS academic, in exchange for having to use the worst programming language (LaTeX) I get to use whatever programming language I please for my work. I've done multiple demos in AT&T x86_64 assembly out of spite and I'll do it again.

I watched the interview DHH had with Lex Fridman and good lord the comments are all so puritanical about what programming should be. Dude just like Ruby and the comments are all "uhm aktuahly ruby sucks." I want to engage with the community for my field more but I don't like being the only grown up.

Whatever person at Microsoft decided to require a sign in for ClipChimp should burn in hell. I just needed to crop a video but seeing that sent white hot fire through my veins and my fist through my monitor.

After five long years I think I finally have a working and comfortable Emacs config! The secret was "server-after-make-frame-hook" which for some reason never came up in my searches for "emacs hook that runs after a frame is created." I used it to make sure treemacs starts with each frame. :P

Animal Crossing New Leaf (2012) #acnl

ZELDA OCARINA OF TIME - Forest Temple.

I decided I need to stop doing all of my grad CS work in C++ so I'm learning Ruby and so far its great! I tried both Perl and Python before this but those are pulling teeth in comparison.

We are here for you 💛 help.kagi.com/kagi/feature...

Ursula K. LeGuin on technology

Julia Child on the fear of failure.

I bought an off brand Wii remote plus and it's pretty decent. With the sensor bar at the bottom of the screen it's pointing is awful, but on top it's pretty good. Wonder if the remote is failing to obey the console setting for the sensor bar position? Might buy another and open it up.

Intel's Pentium processor (1993) can compute sines, logarithms, and other special functions. To do this, it has a ROM with 304 floating-point constants. I reverse-engineered this ROM and extracted the constants. You can see pi in the ROM, binary 11.001001..., encoded in the transistor pattern. 1/n

New Year's Resolution:

I made a gingerbread panopticon

For an upcoming video project I needed to type out some code/commands but really don't want typos or lots of backspacing in them so I wrote a script that can record a remote machine while typing stuff into it. This is a demo recording/mock up and I think it came out really well.

I have a clear and vivid memory of ordering a new watch strap from a retailer but I have no receipt email, transaction on my credit card, or order confirmation page in my history. There's no way I just dreamed it all??

Comprehensive exam results came in, 86.5% average which is well over the 66.7% needed to pass. This makes me feel a lot better about my position in the program.

Cold Air xkcd.com/3016

I finished my comprehensive exams! For me there were only two, the programming languages one I feel pretty confident in even if I ran out of time for one question. The other one is 50/50 depending on how forgiving they'll be about my "loose" phrasing.

My comprehensive exams are tomorrow and I really have no idea what's gonna be in them.

Starting next semester I'll be funded by a research grant, which is exciting because I won't have to teach anymore. It's also a little sad because I really like teaching.

C++ Tip 4! The order you declare variables in a struct or class matters! Member variables are put in memory in the order they are declared but they will be aligned/padded to blocks the size of the largest member. Generally its best to order member variables from smallest to largest or vice-versa.

C++ Tip 3! Ever needed a simple container that could optionally be empty? Well in the standard template library there is std::optional and its for just this! It can be evaluated as a boolean to see if its empty and filled or changed using the equal sign operator. This was added with C++17.

C++ Tip 2! In the standard template library there is `std::pair`, and all it does is store two variables together. This sounds basic but can save you the trouble of making a lot of your own helper classes. I have been using it recently for storing vertex-cost pairs for Dijkstra's algorithm.

Command Line Tip! The 'ls' command is aware of when its output is being redirected or piped, if it is it changes its output to one file per line. This means you don't have to do any special processing to use its output in your scripts!

C++ Daily Tip! You can use references with range-based for loops to modify the contents of the data structure you are iterating over! Just make the looping variable a reference with an &. The following program takes a vector of chars and makes them all lowercase. Its output would be "a, b, c, d, "

I think I'm going to try to do a thing where I regularly post cool Linux command line tricks, I think that could be useful.

Hello! I am a computer science PhD student doing work on computational sustainability. It's early enough in my program that I'm not sure what I'll be working on but it looks like I'll be doing something with traffic scheduling. I also really like programming and Linux!

I've been dealing with some complicated emotional things recently - ended up channeling my energy today into working on pixel art of a Sharp X68000 personal computer. Early WIP, nothing about this is final. Just thought I'd share. 💜👍🏻 #pixelart #X68000 #retrocomputing #retrogaming #digitalart #art