Notices by Sven A. Schmidt (finestructure@mastodon.social)

Strong Wile E. Coyote vibes, and I’m not the Road Runner in this episode.

#Caturday #CatsOfMastodon

At 5.30am he head bumped me again. This is unusual and it meant he wanted to go out. I just firmly said “no” and he left me be 💪

Now as I said, the cat door is blocked both ways at night •and• the dog bed is wedged in front of the door because in the past he's been banging on the door to get out.

In the morning I found he'd partially removed the dog bed •and• he managed turn the red dial into fully open configuration.

This is by far the smartest cat I've known. (3/3)

#Caturday

I’m sure you can see where this is going. We're (also) calling him Houdini for a reason.

Last night he gave me his typical head bump at 4am to be fed. (We've long since come to an agreement that we’ll skip the whole montage of head bump - let me sleep - head bump - let me sleep which just ends with me not going back to sleep at all. Yes, I call this an "agreement" in a feeble act of defiance.) (2/3)

#Caturday

I posted before how Hobbes is a smart cookie. He's figured out quite a while ago how to pull in the cat flap and go out when it's in one-way configuration:

https://mastodon.social/@finestructure/111175356738100738

I've since started flipping it to block both ways at night. Here's a video where I cycle through the settings and I hope it shows that this isn't easy to turn. I don't think a child could turn this little wheel. It's quite small, which means you have little leverage to turn it:

#Caturday #CatsOfMastodon (1/3)

This is a long shot, but does anyone here own a Citroën Ami who'd be willing to answer some questions?

#electromobility #CitroenAmi

@inthehands If this keeps going this well and hopefully leads to a significant and incontestable election win, it’ll end up being one of the most successful political manoeuvres I can think of.

I wonder if we’ll ever learn how much of this was meticulously planned / well executed on the fly / luck.

I exclaimed “oh, f…” - and it wasn’t “fantastic” - when I heard the news and I’m glad I was so wrong. (Not that it’s done but it’s certainly looking better!)

“MacBooks turned out to be the perfect target for the attack, because it works best when you have a very reflective surface to use as the laser target – and the Apple logo on the back of a MacBook screen has an almost mirror-like finish.”

People who plaster their MacBooks with stickers have deployed physical firewalls 👌

https://mastodon.online/@9to5Mac/112926689513444383

@inthehands @phranck ❤️ Calvin & Hobbes.

What messes with me learning French is that while English pronouns agree with the subject, in French they agree with the object.

German is the killer though, because it does both 🤪 Glad I didn’t have to learn •that• as a foreign language.

I love the complexities of and differences between languages.

@inthehands @phranck There’s also that since German is a “gendered” language we grow up thinking of literally everything having a gender. House, car, tree etc. We even assign (and sometimes disagree about 😆) gender for English words used in German. Classic: die Email.

It’s a hard thing to unlearn. When we see “teacher” we tend to think of a male person, because -er is the male suffix in German.

They/them is beautiful and so much simpler than our workarounds dealing with this in German.

The good news is that the Setapp version of Bartender is still on 5.0.48.

But it's probably a good idea to remove its Screenrecording permissions and block it with Little Snitch until there's more clarity around the situation.

@helge @inthehands Vapor’s db stuff (whatever the Sqlite Fluent driver is called) has an in-memory db. Would something like that work?

Been catching up on older @waitingforreview episodes and in one of them @daniel made a great point about side projects: one of the resources to manage is your motivation.

Essentially, it’s ok to deviate from "typical" standards you'd normally (have to) follow - maybe you can't be bothered with tests, maybe you want to try a brand new thing - because your motivation to do the thing is an important part of it.

Don't feel guilty for doing it in ways that are fun. Hold it whichever way you like.

If you’re angry about EU regulations because of cookie banners then malicious compliance has worked on you.

@inthehands Hah, true. These experiments were a bit different though. Sure, you sometimes encountered real problems but the setups were well maintained and by and large you'd get decent results.

What really lends itself to this kind of “broken experiment" is that you gather the data and can't tell if it's any good until you analyse it later. So you wouldn't be messing with students' data collection, “only” with their analysis.

@buherator @inthehands If I had any faith that it wouldn’t immediately leak and alert students I’d actually break an experiment on purpose as an instructor to teach this particular lesson 🙂

@inthehands Reminds me of a lesson I learned about 30 years ago in a physics course. In pairs we had to run experiments a full day and then prepare an analysis.

Our results were garbage. We tried everything to explain the results, all attempts failed. In the end we went in to present our “results” and expected to be roasted.

On the contrary, our tutor was delighted. Turned out an essential part of the experiment was broken and he praised us for doing all the “false negative” analysis 😮

@inthehands I’ve been on a paid plan with Kagi for a year now but I’m not going to renew. Back to DuckDuckGo, I suppose… There’s a distinct lack of search engines that are just… decent.

@inthehands Renewal coming up on Jan 22, so that was impeccable timing. Cancelled 🛑

@inthehands That nicely generalises an observation I once made when switching backend dev from Python to Swift: a lot of my usual Python unit tests fell away because they were essentially type checks in data processing pipelines.

e/BS