Atomic Fox

@tilton I'm not sure what HERE IS does, but I like it.

@db SMASH THEM THEN PUT THE SMASHED BITS IN A CRUCIBLE AND MELT THEM NO MORE THE MACHINE WORKS FOR MAN OR IT IS DESTROYED

@papageier @bodil I am not a computer programmer if I can help it, but I find the following line of argument very interesting : The generative LLM is a machine for producing the "most probable message", which according to information theory is the message we should discard. https://man-and-atom.tumblr.com/post/812029038295187456/now-this-might-be-considered-a-theological

@toddhorowitz@fediscience.org @infobeautiful@vis.social Sure, projecting a quasi-spheroid onto a plane will always cause distortions, but you can choose what to distort. Mercator keeps compass bearings and distorts shapes. The Albers Equal-Area projection, among others, keeps sizes but distorts shapes much more. Anyway, you can always calculate the surface area of land. In fact many countries in the world have been quite thoroughly surveyed.

@RiverFox @MissInformation From what I know of player instruments, they typically work by vacuum. Observing this one, I infer that some of the perforations select between "instruments" or "voices" at a given time, and others control what notes are played.

@phneutral@ruhr.social @Schneems@ruby.social @yosh@toot.yosh.is I have found about a 50% success rate in making connexions on DB. The other day, I got the "your connexion will not be made, kindly fuck off" e-mail before my first train even left the station! In case there was any question, this is NOT acceptable.

@hadley IT IS TIME

@gen @ic5146 At one point BR was selling off little Diesel-mechanical shunters with side connecting rods for virtually nothing. There's a guy in Essex who bought so many of them that his wife forced him to open a museum, so he got some rail laid on his farmland. It's called "Mangapp's".

@hannah Call that "VoIP Frehly"

@plyspomitox The phrase "marketplace of ideas" recalls Francis Bacon's "Idola Fori", one of several categories of errors in thinking which he identified. The reason he compared intellectual discourse to a marketplace is, more or less, the haggling. You bring out your ideas, you set them out on display for everyone who might come by, and then people who find them intriguing stop and argue with you about them.

@acb @futzle Of course, Ü itself is an innovation : it used to be that ü was only used in lower-case, so for instance if you look at the title-page of Chladni's UEBER FEUERMETEORE it is so spelled. And now there's an uppercase ß, which I don't approve of at all! Not to mention requiring "schifffahrt" where everyone used to be happy with "schiffahrt". German spelling, pfui debel!

@spottyfox Up, filth!

@Catvalente@wandering.shop I've been known to use "merging traffic!" because it's about one of the least pleasant experiences I know.

@Znackish@fluffs.au Nice animation!

@n0toose@chaos.social German government furries? Hmm. What about the "Ehemalige kaiserlich und königlich Marzupialforschungsamt", which has dedicated its work for over 150 years to confounding the people who say "no kangaroos in Austria"?

@gsderp @aparrish AND A LARGE ORANGE DRINK

@Chip_Unicorn "Super Trouper" by Abba. The laughter at the guys' backing vocals would have people needing to pee, and start moving toward the exits.

@toddhorowitz@fediscience.org @infobeautiful@vis.social First calculate the (scaled) plane area of the figure as shown on the Mercator projection, then take the square root of the ratio between that area and the true area, and multiply the linear dimensions of the Mercator projection by that quantity. That will give you a figure of the same shape as the Mercator projection but with the area reduced to allow true comparisons. The result is not a map, but a geographical data visualization. And then that helps to show people that, for instance, Greenland is NOT bigger than Brazil! It makes the point more vividly than a table of data. And that's usually the point of visualizations.

@wilbr@glitch.social @gsuberland@chaos.social @DanadasGrau@mastodon.social @shac@ioc.exchange @skaverat@skaverat.net You'd think. But check out what IAEA PRIS does with power reactors that haven't come on-line yet and therefore don't have a date of first grid connection. If you sort the listings by that column — BAM! to 1970 they go. https://pris.iaea.org/pris/CountryStatistics/CountryDetails.aspx?current=GB

@phooky@hexa.club @kuriko@wetdry.world Ah, "One Million Random Digits", the book which states in the foreword that it was not proofread, because it was felt that occasional transpositions and similar errors would not substantially reduce the randomness.

@Pwnallthethings@mastodon.social @scottpurdy@mastodon.world To say that nationality is not relevant to ITAR is formally correct but meaningless. If you have non-US-nationals working for you, you then have to "apply for such authorization from either the U.S. Department of State or the U.S. Department of Commerce, depending on the item" for every single non-US-national employee, every single time you need them to look at anything covered under ITAR, which is a ludicrous list. No business can actually survive under such conditions, even Boeing with its giant office building full of regulatory compliance specialists across the fence from John Wayne Airport. So aerospace firms don't hire non-US-nationals if they can in any way avoid it. In fact this has turned out to be a serious problem even for non-profit educational and scientific organizations, such as the Planetary Society, which had to register as an international arms dealer in order to send a small experiment to be added to a Russian Mars probe. My preferred generic solution to this problem (which obviously doesn't cover 100% of situations) is to staple a Green Card to the back of every Master's and Doctorate diploma awarded in technical fields. As it is, the USA tells lots and lots of foreign students, "you can't stay here without a job, and the field we've just given you a world-class education in is too sensitive for us to allow you to work in, so back to your home country you go, and build up their industry to be a rival to ours, OK?"

@Kirabug@wandering.shop I refer you to my previous message : https://is.nota.live/@tsukkitsune/116517197538064345

@enfys@wetdry.world CEEFAX FOREVER!