Notices by Sven A. Schmidt (finestructure@mastodon.social), page 2

@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

@Gargron I hope you can manage to catch a break over the holidays and get a chance to reflect on having been on Decoder with Nilay Patel this year. You know, that show where CEOs and executives of big/notable companies talk about big ideas and other problems 🙂

@Gargron Dammit, you need eyes like a cat these days

@verge “Elegant dogs on color backdrop” I gotcha

#Taz #DogsOfMastodon

Hobbes vs one-way cat flap. Just look at that smart cookie! He’s perfected his technique.

#CatsOfMastodon

Operating •and• developing Mastodon on this budget is nothing short of amazing.

It’s also unsustainable and we should make sure we don’t just pay for our third party Mastodon clients but donate to the core project.

https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2023/10/annual-report-2022

@inthehands TIL about twin primes, thanks for sending me down that lovely rabbit hole 😄

@inthehands Feel like the two Prime Days should be two days apart now

Prime Day is multiple times a year and two days each time? 🤪

Yesterday, our cat Hobbes was gone over night. He returned in the morning after 16h or so, which is highly unusual for him.

There’s no way he went that long without eating and I now wonder if he’s got another place.

Might call him Mitterrand now 🤔

#CatsOfMastodon

@inthehands Yeah, that size range is the best. I wasn’t a huge fan of the rounded edges on the 6 - but I’d take it over a larger phone in a heartbeat.

@inthehands The mini is the perfect phone, it’s criminal that they’re discontinuing it! My 12 mini is still ok but I feel like I need to hoard an update while I still can…

@inthehands Actually, correction. The iPhone 5c was the perfect phone. Except nowadays it should have FaceID and an edge to edge screen. But he rest was 👌

iPhone 13 mini it is