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FenTiger

@FenTiger@mastodon.social

Mid-40s techie living in #Ely, #Cambridgeshire, UK. Mostly low-level software with bits of #ASIC and #FPGA stuff, #electronics, #RF. Discoverer of the "Snark" in #ConwaysLife. Currently working on memory subsystems for packet matching and filtering in high-speed networking equipment.

Player of #Ingress, under the name "Wrongfellow". I've used this name elsewhere, too.

#Dog and #cat lover. Drinker of #ale and #cider. Occasional #CAMRA and #beer #festival volunteer.

This profile is from a federated server and may be incomplete. For a complete list of posts, browse on the original instance.

futurebird , to random
@futurebird@sauropods.win avatar

I had the eusocial cat dream again. Perhaps it is better described as a reoccurring nightmare! Basically everyone had these cat colonies— but the cats were super intelligent— on the colony level and manipulating global politics.

What’s your reoccurring dream?

FenTiger ,
@FenTiger@mastodon.social avatar

@futurebird Nightmare?

I actually think it sounds like an improvement.

futurebird , to random
@futurebird@sauropods.win avatar

A laser harp synthesizer that you play by wearing mirrors and black patches on your body and doing crazy dance moves.

FenTiger ,
@FenTiger@mastodon.social avatar

@futurebird I'm sure this was invented by someone French. ;)

futurebird , to random
@futurebird@sauropods.win avatar

Did you know you can put a leash on an ant in "Minecraft Create" and lead it over to a train you designed yourself, then give the ant a train schedule and it will drive around and pick things up and drop them off?

I feel like this mod is stalking me and trying to eat my free time.

FenTiger ,
@FenTiger@mastodon.social avatar

@futurebird I think this is more or less how the British railway works.

futurebird , to random
@futurebird@sauropods.win avatar

There are too many ants.

FenTiger ,
@FenTiger@mastodon.social avatar

@futurebird Well, why not just pick the best one, and get rid of all the others? ;)

hrefna , to random
@hrefna@hachyderm.io avatar

Workout advertisements are always just like…

"FEEL THE BURN! PREPARE TO SWEAT!"

and I'm just over here going… but what if we didn't?

FenTiger ,
@FenTiger@mastodon.social avatar

@hrefna Is this a workout or a chilli contest? ;)

hrefna , to random
@hrefna@hachyderm.io avatar

One of my least favorite patterns in software:

"We don't have a field for $foo, but we have bar that no one is using for its intended purpose, so rather than adding a foo field we're going to put $foo in bar"

You can find it all over software, and particularly in databases, and I see it a LOT in development -.-

FenTiger ,
@FenTiger@mastodon.social avatar

@hrefna "But this will save us from having to define exactly what our field should mean. That's always really difficult and error-prone, so we'll save ourselves loads of trouble by avoiding it."

futurebird , (edited ) to random
@futurebird@sauropods.win avatar

[video of cute non-human mammal doing literally any activity]

tumblr: you are KILLING them!

(I'm both happy, and slightly offended that I never get comments about how "doing that is, in fact, abusing ants"... I may however make such comments... but that's a whole other story. Nah, only puppies and kittens get this kind of worry...)

FenTiger ,
@FenTiger@mastodon.social avatar

@futurebird I think some people feel that getting an animal to do anything is "unnatural" and therefore inherently cruel - even if the animal is allowed a choice in the matter.

hrefna , to random
@hrefna@hachyderm.io avatar

If you want an interesting demonstration of how a person (who doesn't particularly know Rust) solves a problem versus how the software solves a problem, these two PRs are worth comparing:

There are a couple of things I want to highlight about these, because I think this is legitimately an interesting thing to look at.

1/

FenTiger ,
@FenTiger@mastodon.social avatar

@hrefna Interesting! Thank you. Some things that stand out to me:

1 - This confirms what I already thought: humans can understand things, AIs can't.

2 - As an experienced programmer who knows no Rust at all, I found the human PR far more understandable, and I even felt that it taught me a little about the language, as opposed to the AI PR which taught me nothing at all.

3 - WTF is with that "New method..." comment? If I was reviewing this, I'd say "hell no" to that.

futurebird , to random
@futurebird@sauropods.win avatar

Do prokaryotic cells look down on eukaryotes for being codependent?

FenTiger ,
@FenTiger@mastodon.social avatar

@futurebird Maybe they pity them? "Poor thing - it's infected with parasites!"

futurebird , to random
@futurebird@sauropods.win avatar

The trials have gone on for so long it's hard to understand that there was a time when people still foolishly thought they might end.

In those days only the first few layers were laid. An ex-president, name long lost to the courts committed some crime & the trials began-

But, he was a powerful man of influence. So soon the trials folded in on themselves: the prosecutor was on trial. And then her prosecutor was on trial... & so on & so on as it has always been since the beginning of time.

FenTiger ,
@FenTiger@mastodon.social avatar

@futurebird @vees A bleak house indeed.

devnull , to random
@devnull@crag.social avatar

On multiple occasions I've listened to instance admins speak about high S3 costs. The sheer amount of data absolutely balloons the more activity your server sees, I get it.

What I don't get is whether there's some unknown fedi ethical reason everybody insists on setting up an S3 cache (followed immediately by complaining about it).

Y'all want to know what the rest of the web does? Hosts their own uploaded media, and links out to the rest...

FenTiger ,
@FenTiger@mastodon.social avatar

@devnull @hrefna @kevinriggle It's also about how much traffic other instances can generate to you. Even a tiny single user instance can see a huge amount of inbound traffic if someone like Gargron boosts one of your posts.

FenTiger ,
@FenTiger@mastodon.social avatar

@kevinriggle We're still trying to learn: https://mastodon.social/@jwz/109411593248255294

@devnull @hrefna

GottaLaff , to random
@GottaLaff@mastodon.social avatar

NBC News: is siding with Alabama court ruling that frozen embryos created via IVF are "babies."

She's good at needling Trump.

She's otherwise despicable.

Kthxbye.

FenTiger ,
@FenTiger@mastodon.social avatar

@GottaLaff I read that Alabama lawmakers want to say that gender is assigned at birth.

How does this apply to a frozen embryo?

futurebird , to random
@futurebird@sauropods.win avatar

Who wants a recursive headache?
One of my very bright students is writing a program to evaluate the total resistance in a network of resistors. She came up with these nested lists to represent the network. The top level is in series and it alternates series and parallel as you go deeper.
[r1, [r2, r3],[[r4, r5,],r6],r7]
That’s r1 + 1/[1/r2+ 1/r3]+ 1/[1/(r4+r5) + 1/r6] + r7
Or
s(r1, p(r2,r3), p(s(r4, r5), r6), r7)
So this ought to be a piece of cake to parse recursively right? right??

FenTiger ,
@FenTiger@mastodon.social avatar

@futurebird Can all possible resistor networks be expressed in this form?

My guess is "no", but that's based purely on intuition.

FenTiger ,
@FenTiger@mastodon.social avatar

@futurebird Well, a teacher once asked me about a cube of resistors, measured between diagonally opposite corners.

The answer: it's symmetrical and so it's OK to add connections between the 3 "nearest" corners and the 3 "furthest" corners, so you get (3 in parallel) + (6 in parallel) + (another 3 in parallel).

But what if they weren't the same? Does this always reduce to a S-P network even if the individual Rs have different values?

Completely off-topic to your original post, I'll admit.

futurebird , to random
@futurebird@sauropods.win avatar

What the heck is a "Traveling Mathematician" ?

(and how do I become one?)

FenTiger ,
@FenTiger@mastodon.social avatar

@futurebird Travelling mathematicians travel with travelling salesmen, to help them with their problems.

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