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Daniel Lakeland
@dlakelan@mastodon.sdf.org
mastodon 4.7.3Applied Mathematician, Julia programmer, father of two amazing boys, official coonhound mix mutt-walker.
PhD in Civil Engineering. Debian Linux user since ca. 1994.
Bayesian data analysis iconoclast
1235 Followers
711 Following
50 Posts
Joined December 11, 2022
Replying to
@cwebber@social.coop @andrewrk@mastodon.social
... If you refrain from participating in the software of the commons, the only thing that you're doing is surrendering more of our collective agency to abusive centralized powers." --Andrew Kelley
Fuck yes, can I get this on a billboard? On a flag? On a t-shirt... paint it on a fucking mural please...
Suppose you have only sort of 1200s technology or so, but modern knowledge of physics and math. You want to make a system of measurements that is reasonably repeatable without reference to a physical prototype. What physical properties do you rely on to define length, mass, and time units?
Replying to
@cwebber@social.coop @andrewrk@mastodon.social
"To me this is completely missing the point, which is to pool effort in order to ensure that in general users of software remain in control of that software. To this end it doesn't really matter if your code gets picked up by AI companies. It primarily matters whether high quality free software is available to users providing competition that limits the degree to which proprietary software can get away with being coercive....
Proposal... The US should overhaul the K-12 public school system to make it K-10 and give everyone 4 years of free tuition at local community colleges after 10th. Liberate the 16 year olds to have more control over their educational path, give them time to try out different topics for a bachelors major, and dramatically reduce cost for a bachelors degree. Plus the variety of things you can take is just dramatically higher.
https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2024/06/24/forking-paths-in-llms-for-data-analysis/#comment-2416652
Re this comment and others on that page. Ultimately the thing that makes people talk about AI as "slop" and distrust people who use it is that its impossible to gain the speed advantages of using LLM bots without abrogating responsibility for the veracity and good intentions and intentionality of the process. You have to trust the *bot* if you use these tools and we dont want to trust the bot. And the people who are subject to the process learn quickly not to trust it.
Replying to
Found out this morning there's a parallel power version of the now discontinued CIA factbook
openfactbook.org
It's great to see so many people *doing* anarchism even if they aren't aware they're doing anarchism.
Hot take: Alfred Hitchcock's "The Birds" isnt a horror movie, its a demonstration of what solidarity looks like.
Replying to
@NathanMurdock@mastodon.social
Honeybees, Apis mellifera are domesticated bees believed to have originated in Africa or Asia and brought by humans to every continent except Antarctica, so they did not naturally occur in the Americas until imported. But they have been here for hundreds of years now.
@glassdelusion@mastodon.social
This article likens cities to feedlots for cattle. the analogy is pretty sound. (slightly too long form substack 🙄)
https://adrianlambert.substack.com/p/cities-are-intensive-livestock-systems
Replying to
@JessTheUnstill@infosec.exchange
Ooh, I actually did this experiment with my kids during the pandemic. We took a disposable pipette and cut it shorter and shorter, measuring the diameter of the resulting tip (getting wider and wider) and then dispensing drops onto an electronic scale, if I remember the droplet mass is proportional to the circumference of the circular orifice with pretty good accuracy. The idea being that the adhesion force is proportional to the thickness of the wall times the circumference.
Replying to
@JessTheUnstill@infosec.exchange
That's a very nice method for a time and a length, then you could use mass of water of unit volume as the mass.
Replying to
@ifixcoinops@retro.social
I've been watching on over-the-air television like some kind of throwback from the last century.
So last night the PUSD board held an emergency session to discuss them being sued for Brown act violations (basically back room dealing rather than transparent discussions in public meetings). We have all these procedural requirements because electing 7 people to decide how schools should be handled is an obviously stupid idea to everyone especially when they go and decide to close some of them for their own personal reasons or to give favors to friends or whatever.
Replying to
@JessTheUnstill@infosec.exchange
The droplet width would certainly depend on the droplet volume. I think you mean if you had a mass standard then you could put a very small and precise mass of water on something like a glass plate and measure the diameter. That'd work I think. But then where does your mass standard come from?
Tried to boot the #guix installer on my server. It hangs at establishing network connectivity. If I switch to a different vt and look at ip addresses it has both a valid v4 and v6 address... It's on a network where http requires a proxy, does it try to check internet access via http? It has no option to set a proxy in the installer? Any guix friends have suggestions?
GenZ holding up the #Jazz #fusion torch
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZgWoZ8YcYus
Mohini Dey band rearranges Michael Jackson's Thriller
Replying to
Elevator Recognition | Burnistoun
Replying to
@GhostOnTheHalfShell@masto.ai
We've got a fledgling crow in our backyard. my dog can't go into the backyard until the bird figures out how to fly... stupid thing fell out of the tree onto our back steps... dog grabbed it but I made her let go, Pasadena Humane came out and assessed the crow then brought it back, apparently it's unharmed, but it's hopping around hasn't yet learned to fly. They thought maybe a few days though. Silly birb
#birb #crow #corvid
I've been having this same issue with a memory leak on my laptop, but last night when I logged out of X the leak went away! So it's not a kernel thing I guess, or it's kernel memory that the Wayland server is demanding/leaking or something... So there's a chance I could get rid of this issue with an upgrade. I just upgraded debian, so I guess it's time to reboot and see what's up.
Götterdämmerungzone...
The Twilight Zone of the Gods.
Replying to
@carolannie@c.im
it is, and it sucks and a ton of people have it that I know of. It seems to have super spread in our community at a high school musical in an outdoor space.
@nomdeb@mstdn.social
Replying to
@r0k@mastodon.social @ObbieZ@urbanists.social @straphanger@urbanists.social
The stuff they supposedly are gonna put in these datacenters is rack mounted hardware that requires a kilowatt or more to run (around here maybe $2500/yr in electricity) has roaring fans, and just isn't gonna be something you want in your home office, also will burn out in 18 months.
Replying to
@the_etrain@beige.party
I think we can just invent a new character for Lauper, maybe someone they meet singing in the cantina.
Now, who would Bill Murray play?
Replying to
@augieray
you can usually smell the exhaust from some engine or other when thats happening. yuck.
Replying to
Obviously, they have a history of extensive real estate holdings as if they were some sort of real estate holding company rather than an educational institution, given that there's so many closed campuses.
The fact of the matter is they're in a structural impossibility that have been given legal mandates to provide certain services to a restricted set of students and they've been funded to the tune of half that required expense. There's literally nothing they can do to avoid going bankrupt
Replying to
@QasimRashid@mastodon.social
Narrowly snuck in before the Battle of Blair Mountain
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Blair_Mountain
Replying to
@jameshowell@fediscience.org
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/don-t-fuck-with-paste/
for those who dont know about this great add-on, we can fight back.
Replying to
@the_etrain@beige.party
Paul Prudhomme as Jabba? Cyndi Lauper as Leia? Morgan Freeman as Obiwan?
Replying to
@vees
This is a pretty widely known problem in the cast iron collector world. I believe the little colorimetric lead test sticks would work to detect this. or a water test dip stick after boiling some mildly acidic liquid in the pot (a teaspoon of vinegar in a cup of water maybe)
Replying to
They are also proposing to close the one school that offers the International baccalaureate program. So this is a program that parents and families have intentionally chosen to send their kids to in an open enrollment system. And it brings people from around the entire district. The report basically points to them redirecting local bond funds. They, by closing certain campuses, can spend the bond funds on the beautification and renewal of their favorite campuses instead.
Replying to
The fact of the matter is that if you're not looking at the restricted budget, everything else basically comes out with revenue equaling cost. So there's absolutely no reason to close any schools, at least any high schools. They have already something like 11 empty campuses because student enrollment has been declining for 25 years. They're doing absolutely nothing with these empty campuses and they're proposing to make more empty campuses.
Replying to
shortfall. So, closing this school is complete, performative bullshit. Looking through the budget published by PUSD on their website, it seems very clear that. They have to spend something like $150 million a year on restricted students. That is to say, students where the money must be used for their needs only primarily special ed and students that don't speak English and who knows what else. But the revenues are like $70M, half of what's needed.
Woke up to fedi women discussing useless horrible men, and damn...
Look, men, there is basically one trick to being happily married. You need to actually both like and love your wife, and she needs to know it.
Replying to
@cdunnpasadena@sfba.social @Kierkegaanks@beige.party @vicgrinberg@mastodon.social
Yes the key is that escape velocity varies with distance because gravity's force varies with distance. When you are close to the surface of the earth the escape velocity of earth is quite high. But if earth went "poof" and ceased to exist, your escape velocity relative to say Jupiter would be pretty much not that big a deal. I mean, you don't feel like it's hard to get out of bed because of the pull of Jupiter right?
Replying to
@zapaman@mastodon.social
If you COULD charge a battery that fast it'd be fantastic though, just put one on every lightning rod in the world, free energy!
Replying to
We will be able to inject or absorb up to 1.2 gigawatt-hours (GWh) of electricity in a few milliseconds
I doubt very much this battery can absorb 360 terawatts of power. Perhaps they mean that within a few milliseconds they can begin supplying or absorbing some unspecified amount of power with a total of 1.2GWh storage?
You degenerates have got my younger son wanting a Mastodon account now. Hes 15 and a budding anarchist. what do I do?
Replying to
@zapaman@mastodon.social
No wait, seriously though. Suppose you had such a battery, and you connected several lightning rod towers around the county say... and then you have circuitry that just charges it continuously from whatever pair has the biggest voltage... You might actually *prevent* lightning strikes, and get free energy? Some kind of back of the envelope is needed here.
Replying to
@TheBreadmonkey
not as much as you would be if you kept getting whipped like that. damn!
#Soccer / #futbol friends, ive looked in the laws of the game and didnt see an answer. If the keeper is partially in and out of the box and the ball may be in or out, what are the conditions that qualify it as a handball when the keeper handles it. I presume ball and keeper entirely out of the box, or both entirely in the box are clear, where does the threshold lie?
Replying to
@SesameSquirrel@mastodon.social
@nazokiyoubinbou@urusai.social @MatthewTitus88@mastodon.social @PurpleJillybeans@kind.social
Gotcha, maybe a techie person could step up here. (I am a techie person but a little overwhelmed ATM with a local school board kerfuffle).
Looking at #Yunohost they have an app called Agorakit, which let's people create groups including calendar and filesharing and discussion. That might be a good way to get a real iCal calendar and have files containing links to the videos and whatnot.
Any tech friends willing to host?
Replying to
@SesameSquirrel@mastodon.social
@nazokiyoubinbou@urusai.social @MatthewTitus88@mastodon.social @PurpleJillybeans@kind.social
love what you do. but wanted to post this screenshot of how the calendar looks on my phone which makes it impossible to use. Is it feasible to have an iCal file so we could literally have the calendar on our calendar apps?
Replying to
@alienghic@timeloop.cafe
No problem. I sent you the group chat link for our Blair activism group but it should have relevant info for any parent in the district