Notices by K‮ly‬e (khird@qoto.org)

@bibliolater Former QOTO user @peterdrake made [a game](https://redslash12.itch.io/gerrymander) on this theme a while back. Not much replay value but a neat puzzle to solve once.

@freemo in cooking, oils are generally triglycerides - we aren't really adapted to consume raw hydrocarbons. And even a low molecular weight species like triformin already has a boiling point over 250C.

@freemo If you're not set on a paint, you might try a wood dye. It sits in the sweet spot between fully opaque paints and natural-tone stains, in that it soaks into the wood and leaves the grain visible but comes in vivid colours. The wear resistance comes from the fact that in penetrates the wood to a certain depth, so you'd have to physically abrade the wood down by a millimetre or so before you start seeing the undyed part.

See rockler.com/transtint-dyes for an idea of the kind of colours you could get. Reminds me of shopping for fountain pen ink!

@freemo a bridge? I'm not sure I understand the description correctly but I'm picturing a bunch of "pilings" placed side by side and a "deck" that lies across the top of all of them.

@freemo he asked about fixing the CORS headers for the instance. QOTO isn't working in the web client he wants to use, and he's been told it's due to our CORS configuration. I think this is also why the MathJax/LaTeX thing has been broken since forever, so might kill two birds with one stone here if you are able to fix it.

@austinrojers @mkljczk

@freemo use a fluid. Water has a remarkably high specific heat and conductivity doesn't matter so much in a fluid because you can use forced convection to transport heat to the sink.

@freemo it's only laterally symmetric, but longitudinally it can still provide stability. Suppose the legs are enough ballast to keep it from rolling - the barrel shape just has to provide enough resistance to pitching to counteract the weight of the head and stop the animal from tipping forward.

Also airplane fuselages are just cylindrical because that's the easiest shape to design a pressure vessel in. It would certainly be convenient to have a rectangular cross section from the perspective of volumetric efficiency, but it'd have to be far stiffer and thus heavier. Planes that place a higher premium on aerodynamic efficiency - fighter jets, aerobatic planes, gliders - don't generally bear much as resemblance to a barrel.

@freemo stability while afloat is a function of shape. Being less dense than water is no good to the poor capybara if it has to spend tons of energy trying to avoid rolling to a nose-down position. Hippos are similarly barrel-shaped.

@freemo also my phone died last month, which locked me out of QOTO for a bit. I've recovered enough to come back, and I'll be able to run my scripts now to identify the potential spammers as we talked about. Should have them by the end of the week.

@freemo Sort of. From 1998 to 2005, Nevada sold "allodial title" if you prepaid your life expectancy's worth of taxes up front. It wasn't complete sovereignty, but it meant it wasn't subject to a substantial chunk of state property law (property tax, liens, etc.).

@freemo en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_pitch_standards_in_Western_music

@freemo okay, thanks! I'll start building a list today and hopefully have it ready the weekend (I use the Mastodon API, so rate limits constrain how fast I can populate the list).

I don't remember Michael by that name - to my recollection, it's been you, arteteco, rgx, me, trinsec, and barefootstache. Maybe he was before I got involved or I didn't know the real name behind one of the above handles. In any case, I'm very thankful for the help.

@freemo I still have my scripts. The real time commitment is manually verifying each "hit" based on my heuristics - I don't just ban people because the script thought they looked suspicious; there can be legitimate reasons to have an account that shares some features typically associated with spammers.

Anyway, I took some time off to see family about a year ago and by the time I came back the backlog was more than I could manage (at the end of 2022, Musk had started making unpopular changes at Twitter and daily influx was really high here). If I sent you a list of ~1k potential spam accounts later this week or early next, would you have the bandwidth to vet it? I think I can handle new accounts at the rate they're created, just not get through the backlog on my own.

@freeschool

@freemo historically, this is the sort of thing one used conky for. Maybe there’s something more modern now.

@freemo historically, this is the sort of thing one used [conky](https://github.com/brndnmtthws/conky) for. Maybe there's something more modern now.

Happy birthday @freemo!

@freemo it's great, for sure. I just have a funky network setup on account of some physical and historical limitations of the property. So I generally expect that, at some point, I'm going to have a segment of the network become unreachable until I go over with a patch cable and reconfigure some setting that got overwritten or needs to be renamed for the new version or whatever. My upgrade plan succeeding without any such contingencies feels very strange.

Just upgraded multiple nodes on my home network to the new @OpenWrt version... and nothing broke. I did my homework and tried to avoid known pitfalls, sure - but that never happens. It feels like the laws of nature are suspended today.

@freemo I wasn't sure of the scope of your question, so I didn't answer. Suppose a paramedic refuses to provide lifesaving care to a person injured in a car crash, because the injured person was clearly at fault. In a sense, the paramedic "let someone die" who was "unwilling but otherwise capable" of following the rules of the road, which in this case is "what was needed to stay alive". That's quite a different situation from the decision to, say, force-feed a hunger striker.

@freemo yeah I'm not a huge fan of the error-catching process either. But it's at least measuring the same way across the board, whether that's by tokenizing words or a quarter of the letter rate or whatever. It's easier to interpret a number where I have that context than one like your keyboard's self-measurement where I don't.

I just did five and got 88, 76, 88, 80, 93. Your 127 would have been first in any of those races.