Notices by Blaise Pabón - controlpl4n3 (blaise@hachyderm.io)

One salient cultural attribute of "free software" that you may notice this calls into question is one's affect with respect to windows support. It seems like "windows support" is doing free work for Microsoft, supporting a proprietary platform rather than getting users to install Linux or whatever, but in practice, projects that support Windows are projects that individuals without full control of their technology stack can run, but Linux-only means "server-only" for a huge majority of people.

I suppose I should have some kind of solution-shaped conclusion to this thread, so here goes. My own contribution here is not that policy & governance solutions are actually stopgaps, and we need to do something else. To the extent that policy & governance — i.e. "politics" — can solve this, it's just regular old politics to do things like institute a wealth tax. We should do that, of course, but it is, as the kids these days say, a "big lift".

But not everything has to be policy.

I think that one of the major things to do here is actually to focus on applications, to talk to users, to do usability studies, to focus on documentation, to make sure everything scales *down*, to put scaled-down "runs on a busted 5-year-old laptop" environments a gating requirement within CI. This doesn't mean the infra people (like myself) should stop doing infra, but we need to find ways to explicitly serve audiences *not* doing enterprise-scale cloud deployments.

today, in "fucking up passkeys", we have this amazing error message from a website designed for _parents of schoolchildren_

Just want to throw it out there that for 30 million dollars you could probably build something good instead.

Meta is scared of Pixelfed. This is the biggest endorsement of Pixelfed that I've seen so far.

https://fosstodon.org/@mastodonmigration@mastodon.online/113819524021365621

The #libcurl backends image got a little less cluttered after we dropped hyper - no more HTTP/1 backends. The January 2025 edition.

Thomas Tortez of the Torres Martinez Desert Cahuilla tribe walks into Painted Canyon in what will be the Chuckwalla National Monument.

(Tyrone Beason / Los Angeles Times)

(2/n)

My daughter just said to me, unprompted, "Daddy, the new @bitwarden redesign sucks SO MUCH," and then enumerated several ways in which it is less usable for her.
My daughter is a classics major, not a techie.
This redesign was a massive self-own for Bitwarden. It's astonishing how many user stories they made harder and less intuitive.
There are a few improvements, but overall it's a catastrophe.
How fast, if ever, will Bitwarden acknowledge their error and fix it?
#infosec #UX

> We can see this difficulty expressed in the task of implementing and enforcing codes of conduct: policies that govern acceptable behavior for a community.

That too, yep.

The number pi has an evil twin! It's a number called ϖ with many properties similar to π. There are even mutant trig functions connected to this number, called sl and cl.

So maybe while you were studying trig in high school, some kid in another galaxy was having to memorize all the identities for these other functions.

I doubt it. Just as pi and trig functions are connected to the circle, this number ϖ and its mutant trig functions are connected to a curve shaped like the symbol for infinity, ∞. But this curve is just less important than the circle. I'm not enough of a cultural relativist to believe there's a civilization that cares more about the shape ∞ than the shape ◯.

This ∞-shaped curve is called a 'leminscate', and ϖ is called the 'lemniscate constant'. I'll show you the leminiscate in my next post.

A civilization will probably only get interested in ϖ when it gets interested in the lemniscate.... or the deeper math it's connected to. On our planet, it was Bernoulli, Euler and Gauss who discovered this math.

(Why does unicode even have the symbol ϖ? Here's why: it's a script version of the Greek letter pi, sometimes called 'varpi' or 'pomega'.)

(1/n)

Take 2 points. Draw all the curves where the product of the distances from these 2 points is some constant or other. These are called the 'ovals of Cassini'.

There's one that's special, shaped like ∞. This is the 'lemniscate'. This is the one connected to pi's evil twin.

Here's a formula for the lemniscate in polar coordinates:

r² = cos2θ

Just as the perimeter of a circle is 2π, the perimeter of this curve is 2ϖ where

ϖ ≈ 2.62205755...

People have computed this number to over a trillion digits.

Just as we can use the circle to define the trig functions sin and cos, we can use this curve to define functions called sl and cl. Most of the usual trig identities have mutant versions that work for sl and cl. For example just as we have

sin²θ + cos²θ = 1

we have

sl²θ + cl²θ + sl²θ cl²θ = 1

To see a graph of sl and cl, go here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lemniscate_elliptic_functions

But I want to show you some formulas for π and ϖ!

(2/n)

Lots of nice formulas for π have partners for the number ϖ!

Back before Twitter became a Nazi bar, I issued a challenge there: find a whole series of numbers like pi, each with its own bunch of formulas. @duetosymmetry took me up on this and invented the numbers ϖₙ:

https://math.ucr.edu/home/baez//diary/june_2022.html#june_12

π is ϖ₂ and ϖ is ϖ₄. So between them there's another interesting mutant version of pi!

(3/n)

@alienmelon
Oh, there's a classic #argentina film called "mi mejor enemigo" about a dog in Patagonia that wanders between #Chile and Argentine soldier camps.

Digitization as public performance-- visit the Vancouver Public Library's prominent book scanner!

"Bringing Vancouver’s Past to the Present: Digitizing Rare Collections with Vancouver Public Library and Internet Archive Canada". https://internetarchivecanada.org/2024/12/18/bringing-vancouvers-past-to-the-present-digitizing-rare-collections-with-vancouver-public-library-and-internet-archive-canada/

A farmer with a wolf, a goat, and a cabbage must cross a river by boat. The boat can carry only the farmer and a single item. If left unattended together, the wolf would eat the goat, or the goat would eat the cabbage. How can they cross the river without anything being eaten?

You probably know this puzzle. There are two efficient solutions, related by a symmetry that switches the wolf and the cabbage.

But what you might *not* know is that this puzzle goes back to a book written around 800 AD, attributed to his advisor Alcuin! Charlemagne brought Alcuin from York to help him set up the educational system of his empire. But Alcuin had a great fondness for logic. Nobody is sure if he wrote this book - but it's fascinating.

It has 53 logic puzzles. It's called "Propositiones ad Acuendos Juvenes", or "Problems to Sharpen the Young". If the wolf, goat and cabbage problem is too easy for you, you might like this one:

"Three men, each with a sister, must cross a boat which can carry only two people, so that a woman whose brother is not present is never left in the company of another man."

There are also trick puzzles, like this:

"A man has 300 pigs. He ordered all of them slaughtered in 3 days, but with an odd number killed each day. What number were to be killed each day?"

Wikipedia says this was given to punish unruly students - presumably students who didn't know that the sum of three odd numbers was odd.

It's fascinating to think that while Franks were fighting Saxons and Lombards, some students in more peaceful parts of the empire were solving these puzzles!

(1/n)

Just when I think I have seen everything.... Donkey in hammock.
https://youtube.com/shorts/JKtOHwbvf70
#asstodon

6 MAGA extremists have introduced a bill in South Carolina that would allow the state to kill women who get an abortion. How? By defining a fetus as a person.

I include their public numbers in my article explaining this barbaric bill—do give them a call:
https://www.qasimrashid.com/p/s-carolina-intros-bill-to-execute

The building where Emmett Till was tortured and murdered is located in Drew, Mississippi on a plantation that was once owned by Leslie Milam, the brother of one of the murderers, JW Milam and Roy Bryant. Although most people believe that Emmett Till was murdered in Money, Mississippi (LeFlore County), he was actually killed in this barn, some 30 miles away in Sunflower County. 1/15
#history #histodons #photography #blackmastodon

when I imagine a return to a glorious and imaginary prelapsarian past it is a return to a time when people made products and told you what the products were, and when newer, unrelated products came out the old products still kept serving the old need without needing to claim that they were some new, different thing and your old needs would soon be abandoned, as soon as they could figure out how to pivot to video