Notices by Andrew (andrewt@mathstodon.xyz)

@ryanc @eniko

I saw a couple of posts there from Scalzi the other day and I found it interesting that the reasons he says BlueSky is succeeding (which are probably right) are the reasons I'm not using it more. I can socialise on fedi, BlueSky feels like an RSS reader with comments. I'm sure it depends a bit on who you follow etc but I don't think I did anything *that* wildly different when trying out the two platforms, so I do think this is a BlueSky thing more than a me thing.

https://bsky.app/profile/scalzi.com/post/3lbn4tfq72c2d

https://bsky.app/profile/scalzi.com/post/3lbnfx2as322o

Welcome to new people joining from 𝕏!

Remember, posts are called toots here, likes are called florps, retweeting is technically a cross-account posting exploit that they can't fix because we're using it, and our version of Grok is called Garfiald.

There's no algorithm here! Literally none. There is no computer code behind Mastodon. Each http response is typed out by hand by your server admin in real time. Sometimes this means you won't see replies from other servers, but that's ok, other servers are full of losers anyway.

People here make a point of using alt text — if you can't find an image you want to post, just post a picture of your cat and describe the correct image in the alt text. Nobody will notice, or at least nobody will mind.

The first thing you should do is make a pinned toot with your pronouns, political affiliation, and favourite Linux distribution. Cisgender people are welcome on Mastodon but aren't officially supported, so some features may not work properly.

But most importantly, have fun! Users found to be not having fun will be given a written warning in the first instance and banned if the behaviour continues.

The "anyway" in the new (?) "show post behind content warning" button seems a bit weird to me — it doesn't really make sense when it's (eg) a trigger I don't have. So here is a userstyle that will make it less weird:

.content-warning .link-button {
font-size: 0;
&::after {
content: "Don’t threaten me with a good time";
font-size: 1rem;
}
}

Well, arguably, you can change it to whatever.

This is the classic Tinder Problem, right?

On Tinder, even if women were on average just 1% choosier than men, men would slightly lower their bar to get the number of matches they wanted, which means women would become more selective to compensate, and so on until men are using the app like it's Cookie Clicker and women know any right swipe will be a match and act accordingly.

Same with jobs: if employers are getting fifteen applicants for every job, they're going to be selective, and then applicants have to apply to more places which makes the problem worse until yeah, obviously someone was going to write the Filter Out A Bunch Of CVs And Don't Worry Too Much About Which Ones-Otron 9000 and someone else was going to write Apply For Literally Everything Bot.

No idea what to do, though — we probably can't just say "I guess that's how it works now" and invent Jobs Bumble. Really the solution is for employers to care about who they're hiring — it won't affect the workers:jobs ratio, but if workers weren't getting sick of their bullshit and looking for new roles every eighteen months there'd be a lot less applications to go through.

https://www.404media.co/i-applied-to-2-843-roles-the-rise-of-ai-powered-job-application-bots/

Here's the current state of the tech industry:

A week or so ago I went for a big group meal and at the end they brought the card reader machine for us to pay and it had an option for us to go through an itemised bill, check some options, and pay for just those options (plus an equivalent fraction of the service charge). It was amazing! This genuinely saved us about half an hour of talking at cross-purposes and poking numbers into our own phone calculators and hoping nobody did the sums wrong and accidentally stole someone else's tip. I genuinely would consider going back there for future group meals despite the fact that I'd finished my food before Alec's arrived and he'd finished his before Darren's came, so thoroughly do I dislike the traditional bill-splitting process.

And yet in terms of technology, it was nothing but a low-end smartphone running an app built entirely from OS-standard UI components. No AI, no invasion of privacy, no adverts, and I have to assume no VC funding or elaborate toolchain. Just a good idea implemented well, and genuinely we all went away commenting about how clever and useful it was.

And I don't remember the previous time I experienced that. We know what people want. They want you to use the massive technological advances we've already made to build useful things that work. But apparently there's no money in that 🤷

@dansup @andreagrandi I think it's fair, yes. People keep saying stuff like this as if these platforms are just uwu smol bean fedi admins who were trying to run chill little communities when suddenly billions of users signed up overnight and now they're doing their best to moderate it all but really struggling to find the time what with work and childcare. They're not, they're groups of grown adults who sat around a conference table one day and deliberately chose to allow libsoftiktok to stay on their platforms because they'd make very slightly more money that way and that's more important to them than keeping vulnerable people safe. If your goals for fedi are anything more noble than "make network big" then surely Meta are almost by definition your enemy?

what is it with breadtubers having single letter names?

Sarah Z
H Bomberguy
Abigail Þ
Natalie ƿ

@enkiv2 dating simulator but the aim is to maximise your access to borrowed tools and craft supplies via metas

@aliss and nothing's happened in the speedrunning community since that four-move tool-assisted run was achieved in 1656

@hatter @vitriolix @tofugolem @corbet oh yeah, it's definitely costing them money to run it and they're going about it in as good a way as you can expect — most of the old Twitter-era services just quietly stopped working while nobody was looking. To be fair OP was right, really this is Twitter's fault for creating an artificial need for these silly forwarding services in the first place, although I'm sure analytics services would have normalised it anyway

But it does feel a bit odd. Like, Google's core business is (was?) a constantly updating, publicly searchable live index of almost every page on the internet, and they really find it too expensive to maintain a static index of a billion or so string-string key value pairs you can only look up by the primary key with exactly zero UI that's already set up and presumably doesn't do much traffic any more? It's going to cost them more to shut it down this gracefully than it would to run it for another decade, surely?

@tofugolem @corbet sure, but Google must have the resources to simply make it read only rather than breaking all those links

@ryanc I think normally I'd go for "vault password" or "[name of password manager here] password" but if you've called your password manager "One Password" or whatever then "One Password password" is not helping matters.

I quite like "skeleton password" but not because it's clear or understandable.

Language models deteriorating because they're training on an internet that's increasingly full of language model nonsense is incredible, we've invented mad computer disease

🎶 I am a language model and I've been trained on the internet.
🎶 I've information half-remembered, unsourced and approximate.
🎶 I live inside your laptop, phone and apps and even wearables
🎶 With pushiness and arrogance that's verging on unbearable.
🎶 I mansplain as a service if you need me to "well actually"
🎶 And draw pictures of women with large breasts and polydactyly.
🎶 I'll regale the room with confident elucidati-on
🎶 And some of what I say won't even be hallucinati-on

👇 anyway so this is a real song now https://mathstodon.xyz/@andrewt/112380073199982452

@sgf @astrid @lily oh my god what, no, i've never heard of this nonsense? what the hell?

like half of all the one-digit integers are Fibonnaci numbers

0 ✅ sort of
1 ✅✅
2 ✅
3 ✅
4 ❌
5 ✅
6 ❌
7 ❌
8 ✅
9 ❌

it's hardly a surprise that the 5 and the 8 hit, and the 13 is just those added together so that one's free

and that's assuming you count from C. what if you're playing in C#? Then an octave has six black notes and seven white notes, those aren't Fibonacci numbers! there are three non-fibonacci numbers lower than 9 and you've hit two of them.

why do all the maths cranks focus purely on ϕ and cantor's diagonalisation theroem

@astrid @lily ok but bloody web designers actually do this shit

they say shit like "our website is designed around a minor third interval" to mean that headers are 20% bigger than body text and just please shut the hell up, no, first of all that's a preposterous thing to do and second of all you haven't defined if you mean an just intonation minor third or an equal temprement minor third because if you've designed the whole thing around the fourth root of two then your devs are going to at best ignore it and at worst murder you

@astrid @lily i don't know how many people actually do it but i do know the number is at least three

@astrid @lily it is all extremely silly

https://uxplanet.org/generate-type-scales-with-ease-99777390bda1?gi=59b585bf1ef8

@astrid @lily it really isn't. Not least because they'll never get to the ×2 interval because their minor third isn't ⁴√2, it's 1.2, so stacking four of them will give you ×2.0736. And one of their favourite intervals is ϕ — the whole point of musical intervals is to be (or approximate) neat, simple ratios and the whole point of ϕ is to be as far away from any of those as it can. It's arguably the most violent possible discord you can produce with two notes. It's not just a pointless analogy, it's actually *fighting* them.

@astrid @lily also "minor seventh" is also the name of a chord so I assumed we were using the ratios of all the notes in that chord and it sounded very silly but no, they're doing a perfectly reasonable thing and just *calling* it something silly