Notices by Mark T. Tomczak (mark@mastodon.fixermark.com)

@mayadev @ton @ariaflame @cstross I agree it has consequences. My point is it should not. Source of authority on one's gender should be the person, not some document they didn't have agency over.

This unfortunate circumstance is giving the lie to the entire British government policy of caring deeply what one's birth certificate says about one's gender. It's an absurdity that proves the farcical nature of the whole system's approach.

@cstross "They'll assume our daughter is transgender" is big "And why should that be a problem?" energy.

@AnarchoNinaWrites Fair enough. I don't know you and therefore have no opinion of you. Only opinions on the likelihood that support for Israel or for Palestine was a major factor in this election.

@AnarchoNinaWrites 2021 was after people voted for Biden over Trump; they were still locked down when they were voting. And the lockdowns meant a lot of people who often can't vote because of other issues (like juggling 1.5 fulltime jobs and other responsibilities, y'know, the kinds of things that might lead a person to think "I bet the Democratic platform would make my life better") couldn't go to work on that Tuesday, so they voted.

Believe me, I'd like to think genocide was a major issue that made voters stay home. But it's hard to suss out this number set (as well as the fact that more people voted for Trump in 2020 than in 2016) without thinking "It's probably the pandemic."

Harris pulled more votes than either Clinton or Biden did.

@AnarchoNinaWrites BIden also beat Trump on "We are currently in lockdown due to a pandemic and that asshole is the one in charge."

It's hard to disambiguate what had a larger effect. Figuring out why people vote how they vote is the stats problem from hell.

@mekkaokereke This was pretty much the take in chaos monkeys, a book by a former ad exec at Facebook.

His take on the CA scandal it was that it was basically tea leaf reading. While there was certainly a risk that they could have hound some kind of fundamental breakthrough in shaping people's voting patterns through micro targeting based on social network, there wasn't very much evidence at all to suggest it worked. But what it did indicate is that the campaign was willing to spend money on everything--- They were trying tea leaf reading because they had already spent all the money they planned to on standard channel marketing, while the Clinton campaign thought that he was so obviously beatable that it wasn't worth the money to spend on counter advertising and grassroots campaigning in "fortress" states. The party instead moved a lot of the money from the presidential race to the down ticket races.

CA was a warning, not a cause of victory.

@mcc Recently learned that Einstein was pretty bearish on black holes also. In that case, it was because (IIUC) his process was often "Think about a possible model for how the universe works, think through the consequences of that model, test those consequences against reality..." And when he applied that reasoning to the gravitational singularities in the math he went "But that would imply there would be these... holes in space. We've been looking for thousands of years and we don't see any holes; where are all the holes?"

I can't remember if he lived long enough for astronomers to get back to him with "Well now that we know we should be looking for 'wild bullshit happening around nothing'... We turned our telescopes towards that and UH-OH!"

@mcc Yes, I love this.

This is the thing I sometimes think is missing from a lot of science education--- We can get so hung up on having students memorize explanations for things that we can forget that the whole point of the explanations is that there are real phenomenon that make no intuitive sense whatsoever and the explanations are the best we can do with unifying all these otherwise disparate, random, mad world behaviors into something approaching a human-shaped story.

Time dilation sounds like nonsense idea a person made up to troll you until you find out the history of people conducting experiments to figure out the speed of light and getting baffled by the observation that the damn thing doesn't change!

@ianholmes @mcc @BillyGlennHoya Couldn't tell you; I haven't followed Pokémon since Red and Blue.

@BillyGlennHoya @mcc these guys don't get enough credit for asking some very fair questions.

I hear that lyric and I'm reminded of the story Richard Feynman would tell about how he got into physics because he had questions about how a ball in his little red wagon worked that his dad couldn't answer... And after years of working in the field he came back to his dad with an explanation of momentum and inertia and his dad hit him with something to the effect of "Sounds like you just gave names to the stuff we don't know; you didn't actually explain it."

@JordiGH

@netbsd Figuring out code is tainted by use of copyrighted code from another source is as straightforward as string-matching, maybe some fuzzy matching.

How would one identify code generated with the assistance of an LLM if the contributor doesn't admit to doing that?

@lauren Isn't this a good thing? People who want to bypass the generative content can just go to the "Web" tab now. Granted, I'd like a way to shortcut into it like images.google.com taking me straight into Image search, but I imagine writing a Chrome extension to wallpaper that shouldn't be too hard if clicking the "web" button becomes a burden.

@gsuberland @mcc One almost wonders if the end-game is to stop pulling and try pushing.

Maybe instead of trying to claw back data we've made publicly crawlable because "I wanted it visible, but not like that" we ask why any of these companies get to keep their data proprietary when it's built on ours?

Would people be more okay with all of this if the rule were "You can build a trained model off of publicly-available data, but that model must itself be publicly-available?"

@jtlg @foone Yes. Hence the invention of the "triumvirate," a method for deciding if a program succeeded by running it three times; if all three runs agreed on the output, the run could be considered successful.

This was incredibly inefficient and left Rome vulnerable to sacking by the Hypervisigoths in the 5th Century.

@thomasfuchs Trouble, of course, is there's no money in web browsers.

@schizanon This is going to vary from server to server. Short of running your own server (I know, not a small ask), you may have to migrate to a server that chooses to federate with Threads.

This Reddit thread suggests that mastodon.social does not plan to de-peer Threads.

Here's how to migrate your account to another server: https://fedi.tips/transferring-your-mastodon-account-to-another-server/

@lauren There's a big gap in my understanding of how scam callers stay on the network.

My uncle gets about three a day. All probably from the same company, because the prefix audio (the sounds their robocall machine makes patching through to a human being) are all the same. They call from dozens of different numbers.

Where has the phone network broken down that carriers can't just say "These numbers? They're scammers. Cut 'em?" The phone network isn't like the IP network where all you need is a computer and an Ethernet cable... Someone has to be signing off on these customers.

@SecurityWriter FWIW, If I understand correctly fail fast is exactly how they got the Dragon architecture operational, and that is now crew rated and a regular service carrier for the ISS. But I think the key difference is that they were using fail fast for the experimental recovery process and not the launch and orbit attainment process. Because those are solved problems and they couldn't afford to be losing other people's stuff when there were reliable alternatives out there.

There are no reliable alternatives for a single stage to orbit mega craft. I don't know that there's any potential way to do it other than trying to do it.

@WowSuchCyber @SecurityWriter At the cost of 2.5% of US GDP over a decade. And that was a multi-stage vehicle with no need for the structural integrity to land anything except the final return stage.

I should perhaps amend my comment to expand the thought. "If you have 2.5% of the GDP of one of the richest nations on the planet for 10 years and your problem constraints involve being able to discard about 95% of the vehicle in mission success, you stand decent odds of mission success with no catastrophic vehicle failures. If you're also lucky (If that pogoing problem had gotten much worse it would have ruined the vessel, and it would not even acceptable for crew).