Notices by Matthew Lyon (mattly@hachyderm.io)

this is an amazing thread overall about blues guy and de/centralization, but this point is salient: if you want something to be truly “you can host it yourself” it *has* to scale down https://social.coop/@cwebber/113527722905101234

if you do data processing of source material in postgres, and haven't yet gotten into Window functions, you are missing out. You can offload entire workloads and code pipelines to the database, which can probably figure out how to handle what you're doing more efficiently than you can; work in some Common Table Expressions (WITH) and you have a grammar for doing all sorts of things via queries that you'd normally start with procedural code for

https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/tutorial-window.html
https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/queries-with.html

@quinze that's a different topic, but sure

I would advise anyone looking at "AI companies are making deals with larger, more powerful rights-holders to pay for some of the IP they've been stealing" to consider that this will work out at best for the individual creators as well as Spotify has for musicians; probably worse.

@ydyhm My family's giving plan doesn't include internet strangers, sorry

I'm still doing my weekly link roundups: https://lyonheart.us/links/2024-11-22/

This week:
Moderation & Safety
https://letterbook.com/blog/post/2024/11/18/moderation-tooling-research.html
https://www.wrecka.ge/against-the-dark-forest/
https://ssd.eff.org/
Expertise https://pluralistic.net/2024/11/21/policy-based-evidence/#decisions-decisions
Invisibility https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a62875397/homelessness-in-america/
Naming https://www.anildash.com/2024/11/19/dont-call-it-a-substack/
Outliers https://www.goethe.de/prj/geg/en/thm/tru/25453339.html
Consent https://aworkinglibrary.com/writing/dreaming-awake
Locations https://location.foursquare.com/resources/blog/products/foursquare-open-source-places-a-new-foundational-dataset-for-the-geospatial-community/

@janl it straddled the eras when google made good stuff because they thought good stuff needed to be made, and when they made things because they could get people promoted

Gatekeeping Figureheads will be the death of this place https://social.coop/@graue/113523873101355124

Contemporary Cyberpunk looks like UserStyles, exhibit 412

@Gogledd @forestine oh interesting; I should study that design a bit more

@technomancy when they first launched, they'd notify you whenever anyone said anything including either your first or last name

In addition to having a relatively common name which I've somewhat abated by not going by the shortened version, I'd also get pinged any time someone talked about the Dave Matthews Band

real geniuses over there

@Gogledd @forestine interesting; some sort of diode-based waveshaper?

In case it’s not clear: I don’t think these sorts of challenges are very effective at seeing how someone will do actual day to day software work

for the curious about the game & homing thing, here's how I did the homing projectile, homershot/update tracks the target and homershot/fire chooses it: https://codeberg.org/mattly/prism-escape/src/commit/556299d8451352d80e753473122071767ea5381e/prism-escape.fnl#L252

you've got 1k+ Excel files which are snapshots of voting results for a county, each worksheet is one "race", each row is a precinct and each column is an entry on the ballot and vote type (mail, in-person, provisional). The timestamp is in the file name. Find places where the vote count _decreased_ going forward in time for any one cell across two files. Use whatever you're comfortable with

I did both of these things recently, they each took me about an hour (3/3)

you're making a game, your ship has x,y, velocity, & direction, and you fire a homing projectile. It has to choose a close target taking into account its nearness to the angle you're facing. The projecile has x,y,inertia,thurst and hunts its target, which is moving… (2/3)

between the game jam last month and some data processing volunteering I'm doing around voting patterns, I've had some real fun "code challenges" that exceed in both explainable usefulness AND actual challenge than anything I ever had to do in an interview

"reverse a linked list" my ass, next time you need to "see how someone solves problems" get a bit more creative: (1/3)

@janl

Growing up, my mom had a friend who worked at the Monterey Bay Aquarium, and I got to go a LOT. It set the bar for me on what an Aquarium should be, and it’s a very, very high one.

Taking my own child there is one of the main reasons I’m trying to figure out logistics (primarily extended family/politics) for a family trip down that way. https://hachyderm.io/@skinnylatte/113511485677324642

@puppygirlhornypost2 @jenniferplusplus Thanks; There’s a whole bunch of stuff that goes into that caring, but I Have Seen Some Shit You Wouldn’t Believe (well, *you* might, most people don’t)

I said
> I've learned a lot of things through this work, but perhaps the most important is: when you are designing for practitioners, you need to listen to the people doing the work.

and I mean it. I really wish more people understood how important that listening is.