@hrefna@hachyderm.io cover
@hrefna@hachyderm.io avatar

hrefna

@hrefna@hachyderm.io

SRE at Google. Queer. Poly :potion_polyamory: Trans :verified_trans: :nonbinary_potion: Engineer. Ace :flag_ace: Member of AWU-CWA. #ActuallyAutistic :rainbowinfinity: #UnionStrong

Opinions my own. Does not suffer fools gladly.

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

hrefna , to random
@hrefna@hachyderm.io avatar

"Women would rather run into a bear in the woods than Lord Byron"

hrefna , to random
@hrefna@hachyderm.io avatar

While researching fairy stories I stumbled into the story of Childe Rowland—which involved a child of Guinevere, Merlin showing up, etc in this story of the fairylands—and was chatting with my partner about it and how Arthurian characters are basically "stock characters" of a certain era: they have certain traits and show up together in certain ways to tell whatever story.

My partner then sent me this from an intro to Perlesvaus.

is really just fanfic all the way down.

What is so fascinating is that a certain story-teller adapted and reworked existing material, and must have done so for a very definite purpose. 'Literary endeavor in the Middle Ages,' writes Bernard Weinberg, 'was essentially an art of imitation. Since little emphasis was placed upon originality of subject matter, since praise went rather to the combination and interpretation of familiar materials - or to stylistic qualities - the author felt free to appropriate whatever themes or episodes best suited his fundamental conception. Thus an Arthurian romance was usually a tissue of commonplace incidents and motifs. developed in accordance with the purpose or the taste of the individual writer.’
ALT
  • Reply
  • Expand (7)
  • Collapse (7)
    • hrefna OP ,
    @hrefna@hachyderm.io avatar

    My partner and I have talked for a while about this phenomena: there is no "canon" to Arthurian Literature. None. There is a huge body of work, but none of it can be considered canonical.

    Lancelot comes about because someone (potentially Eleanor of Aquitaine) commissioned a writer to basically expand the story in a way that she would enjoy. Perlesvaus (The High Book of the Grail) is someone processing their trauma of war, and probably specifically from the Sack of Constantinople.

    hrefna OP ,
    @hrefna@hachyderm.io avatar

    When the Prophecies of Merlin got translated into Old Norse-Icelandic (Merlínússpá) they turned into poetry in the form of the sagas, modified the characters, and adapted it for the local audience

    Later stories were written by (gay, bored) monks for entertainment. Other characters take either Irish heroes (e.g., Cú Chulainn) or their local equivalents and create a knight out of them (Gawain)

    Modern readers often want to build a consistent corpus and timeline out of it, and you can't.

    hrefna OP ,
    @hrefna@hachyderm.io avatar

    @JessTheUnstill Yup! Exactly. Inclusive of what most people think of Christianity up until the First Council of Nicaea and the Council of Laodicea.

    hrefna OP ,
    @hrefna@hachyderm.io avatar

    @JessTheUnstill

    I mean isn't "there is no signed constitution but we locked a bunch of people in a room to decide what is canon" basically the British government?

    rimshot

    hrefna , to random
    @hrefna@hachyderm.io avatar

    It goes without saying, but explicitly, if you show up on me saying something like this to say that "almost everyone at Google is incompetent down to the rank-and-file" I am just going to block you.

    You aren't being even remotely rational in your approach and I question whether you are here in good faith.
    https://hachyderm.io/@hrefna/112470793925252496

    hrefna , to random
    @hrefna@hachyderm.io avatar

    I find it worthwhile to go back now and again and look through analyses of why a piece of software succeeded or failed.

    It's always particularly illuminating to look at three things:

    1. The role of leadership in the failure.
    2. How much leadership got paid regardless/what happened to leadership afterwards.
    3. What happened to the rank-and-file who actually build the software.

    The story is always basically the same, with a few variations on the themes.

    https://kotaku.com/how-biowares-anthem-went-wrong-1833731964

    hrefna OP ,
    @hrefna@hachyderm.io avatar

    People will occasionally poke at Google's developers for something about one of Google's products and its like… I agree with you, as do most developers I know (not that I talk about specifics publicly in the moment).

    You have to look above the team who is doing the work. They've probably already said their piece and were simply ignored.

    hrefna , to random
    @hrefna@hachyderm.io avatar

    People who know nothing about ecology hear about something that requires no work or understanding on their part but where they can "spread awareness online": "YES THIS IS THE BEST THING EVER."

    Applies to more than just ecological activism, of course

    Rather than saying "I'm not going to mow for a month!" take a while and actually learn what is in your yard. Don't just hop on arbitrary bandwagons with no understanding of what you are looking at

    But learning is complex, "not mowing" is easy 1/

    hrefna OP ,
    @hrefna@hachyderm.io avatar

    You can do significant damage to your ecological system by just doing things like "not mowing" arbitrarily, especially depending on where you live. You can also cause more damage by leading various things in the environment to "take shelter" in your yard and then resuming mowing come June.

    What's more, just letting things grow will usually invite in invasives and noxious weeds and will promote invasive monocultures.

    Grass laws are terrible, but "ignore it" isn't the solution.

    2/

    hrefna OP ,
    @hrefna@hachyderm.io avatar

    What can you do instead?

    Learn about native plants, learn about noxious weeds, learn about water conservation in lawn building, look into strategies like xeriscaping. If you need a lawn then look into local grasses and legumes

    Be prepared for this to take a long, long time/

    You may have to water, you will have to do maintenance, but it will be better for the environment than just letting your lawn go with whatever invasives happen to be in your area

    Not all substitutes are created equal 3/

    hrefna OP ,
    @hrefna@hachyderm.io avatar

    If you need to keep a lawn for your HOA there may be nothing you can do about it, but again the solution is not "just let whatever grow" (if you would even be allowed to do that, many of them specify grasses).

    The solution is learning the soil, learning the land, and learning the plants.

    That is the way.

    4/4

    hrefna OP ,
    @hrefna@hachyderm.io avatar

    @joby I feel that saying in my bones.

    I've been learning pasture management and it is a lot. As you say a lot of it is building a solid intuition about plants (and conquering "green blindness," but that goes along with developing that intuition).

    hrefna , to random
    @hrefna@hachyderm.io avatar

    I hate -.-

    The root fragment on the right is a remnant from last year that is mostly dead except for about once inch on the end. I just pulled it.

    hrefna , to random
    @hrefna@hachyderm.io avatar

    This is really, amazingly cool work. https://recurse.social/@lindsey/111180369571322649

    hrefna , to random
    @hrefna@hachyderm.io avatar

    Holy… 5.5 hours of lore x_x Well that's my freetime for a few days.

    https://youtu.be/4n9eakXNsIQ?si=WFmeJeZfEhGVn84N

    hrefna , to random
    @hrefna@hachyderm.io avatar

    slams desk emphatically THANK YOU. This matches my exact experience with small talk and gives me a good analogy for it.

    The one comment on cockatiels is just chef's kiss, because that is exactly how it works with birds (and in people, though we like to deny it).

    It's not my favorite mode of interaction, but if you understand its purpose as a social ritual it seems a lot less meaningless.

    The other thing: I like to stick it at the end of the conversation.

    https://www.tumblr.com/thetetra/750913052342419456/i-figured-out-i-was-autistic-when-i-was-explaining

    hrefna OP ,
    @hrefna@hachyderm.io avatar

    Like I used to help run these study groups that would involve discussion and an exercise

    I would let people do small talk at the beginning but wouldn't participate, because some of the other participants were more extroverted and liked to do their "Are you a dog!" "I'm a dog!" exchanges early. When it lulled I would step in and we could run the group, but then we'd return to small talk and I would participate in that as part of the social ritual

    Because it is important as a piece of the ritual

    grimalkina , to random
    @grimalkina@mastodon.social avatar

    I have NOT read this paper yet so this is not a Cat endorsement yet but the title and premise is good enough to share 👀

    https://www.cell.com/trends/cognitive-sciences/fulltext/S1364-6613(24)00105-0

    hrefna ,
    @hrefna@hachyderm.io avatar

    @grimalkina This has a lot of very strong parallels and resonance with a presentation I recently saw from Prof. Steven Bird about non-extractive methods of training language models (based on this paper https://aclanthology.org/2024.eacl-long.50.pdf).

    hrefna ,
    @hrefna@hachyderm.io avatar

    @grimalkina

    I can just see Quijano going:

    Thank GIF

    hrefna , to random
    @hrefna@hachyderm.io avatar

    Stupendium's Production Line is like "yes yes, eldritch monsters, but have you considered the horrors of capitalism?"

    https://youtu.be/HYdOZOdjXnI?si=tGjbnxdiBYj4aPn6

    hrefna , to random
    @hrefna@hachyderm.io avatar

    Why are horses?

    ami_angelwings , to random
    @ami_angelwings@urusai.social avatar

    wait what year is this

    https://youtu.be/OHpiIAJiExo

    hrefna ,
    @hrefna@hachyderm.io avatar

    @ami_angelwings my immediate response as well

    Robin Williams What Year Is It GIF

    hrefna , to random
    @hrefna@hachyderm.io avatar

    It always bemuses/annoys me when some smug ass sails into a theological debate with "who cares it is all made up anyways."

    My brother in clearly-not-Christ, have you been in fandom spaces on the internet? Ever?

    Go ask a Tolkien group about Tom Bombadil and see what happens, or ask any group of straight male genshin players if any given character is a lesbian.

    It's especially annoying when those debating aren't actually followers of said faiths and are just borrowing the lens.

    hrefna , to random
    @hrefna@hachyderm.io avatar

    Everyone wants to do the fun work, everyone wants to play with grand ideas, but getting people to actually do the gritty, challenging, in-the-weeds work is really difficult.

    Getting people to agree on how to do the in-the-weeds work is really difficult.

    Then, getting people to acknowledge that you did the work is further complicated.

    hrefna OP ,
    @hrefna@hachyderm.io avatar

    @elfieclaire Language geekery:

    Two different colloquialisms (English is being English). To "go off into the weeds" means "to wander far astray," "in the weeds" means "immersed or entangled in details and complexities."

    The former seems like an analogy to hiking, the latter seems more like something out of horticulture (weeding a garden), but I don't know that either have particularly certain etymologies.

    hrefna , to random
    @hrefna@hachyderm.io avatar

    Ballet floor program, aka, "you know those tiny muscles in the hips that you maybe saw once in advanced anatomy and never thought about again? that's now the focus of an exercise, you're welcome. Oh, your heart rate won't get above 120, but you will feel like you are going to die afterwards anyways."

    hrefna OP ,
    @hrefna@hachyderm.io avatar

    @fanf42 Heh, there's definitely an overlap in experience there (I'm an out of practice 2nd dan in Hapkido).

    There are a lot of muscles you just never think about that these disciplines actively use and develop.

    hrefna , to random
    @hrefna@hachyderm.io avatar

    This statement is going to live rent-free in my head for a long time to come, I suspect.

    hrefna OP ,
    @hrefna@hachyderm.io avatar

    @adamhotep

    That irony was not lost on me in the slightest.

    @tchambers

    hrefna OP ,
    @hrefna@hachyderm.io avatar

    @maegul

    A few things.

    First, that is laughably far from where we are today.

    Second, to the degree we are there it has very little to do with ActivityPub and more to do with people believing in the vision of the fediverse.

    Finally, given the lack of support for (and the massive resistance toward) quote-boosting, differing formats between platforms, etc it's hard to see how you can claim that the vision of not using screenshots is something that we are approaching.

    @adamhotep @tchambers

    hrefna OP ,
    @hrefna@hachyderm.io avatar

    @maegul

    Further driving home that last point is the outright hostility in certain corners toward "bridge" technologies or towards anything that might look like it hypothetically may make it onto a major (or minor but wannabe major) social media platform.

    @adamhotep @tchambers

    hrefna OP ,
    @hrefna@hachyderm.io avatar

    @tchambers

    One of about twenty examples, and another example of it being solved by people working around the protocol more than they work through the protocol.

    Even then getting here required a lot people doing a lot of fighting over the course of multiple years, a lot of burnout, and involved a lot of derision and attacking of people who come from different online cultural experiences.

    @maegul @adamhotep

    hrefna OP ,
    @hrefna@hachyderm.io avatar

    @tchambers Like yes, it's great we're getting that, and also let's remember what was involved to get here and how little of that discussion was about the protocol representation.

    Meaning, flatly, if this was a priority for the protocol then something was lost in translation

    See also:

    And also: https://www.techpolicy.press/the-whiteness-of-mastodon/

    @maegul @adamhotep

    hrefna , to random
    @hrefna@hachyderm.io avatar

    I'm personally of the view that 's 2.2 quest was one fo the strongest from a story perspective and one of the weaker ones from a game storytelling perspective.

    Turn that plot into a movie or a light novel and I'm all in, but they tried to do a lot of things and I don't think they all worked together particularly well mechanically.

    hrefna , to random
    @hrefna@hachyderm.io avatar

    I swear respects the players time and attention less than any major title in the last ten years. The game goes out of its way in several ways to just underscore how little it understands these things.

    Going back to my earlier criticism: there is a third of four different games in Fallout 4 and those thirds don't play nicely together.

    hrefna OP ,
    @hrefna@hachyderm.io avatar

    Pop quiz

    • Can I pick up that extinguisher?
    • Will the refrigerator open or can I take items out of it or neither?
    • Is there an in-game key for this lock/console? Is that key in the same building?
    • I found a secret passageway! Is it meaningful or a dead end with maybe a few steel scraps?
    • Is putting my time into building settlements out worthwhile? How can I know?
    • If I am bombarded by requests, how do I prioritize which ones to do? Can I take a break from requests to focus on the story
    hrefna OP ,
    @hrefna@hachyderm.io avatar

    @ladytel "I seriously have equipped every member of your town with advanced weapons and armor, set up a missile turret that can basically single-handily defend the major choke point into the settlement, an artillery cannon, and there are guard towers all over the place. Why do you need or even WANT me to babysit you?"

    hrefna , to random
    @hrefna@hachyderm.io avatar

    Of course, part of the problem of knowing if you have the same object or if there has been an update is that to do it properly requires canonicalization, which is normally a nightmare, but is an extra special nightmare if it means you have to process the JSON-LD and also define ownership relationships that don't exist at the moment -.-

    hrefna , to random
    @hrefna@hachyderm.io avatar

    Examples of the things SWICG is publishing that should, IMO, be FEPs: https://swicg.github.io/activitypub-webfinger/

    hrefna , to random
    @hrefna@hachyderm.io avatar

    Love the look of using server-to-server blocks like you would a personal blocklist. Just love it.

    hrefna , to random
    @hrefna@hachyderm.io avatar

    "This is a server-to-server protocol that is specified like a client-to-server protocol."

    "Why are all of the distributed systems engineers twitching?"

    hrefna , to random
    @hrefna@hachyderm.io avatar

    Part of my frustration with and one of the things I find baffling giving everything else in it: the lack of tools for backpressure.

    Backpressure is fundamental in building reliable distributed systems (c.f., Notes on Distributed Systems for Young Bloods). From a C2S perspective I get why it wouldn't need to be specified, but from a S2S federated protocol perspective its absence is frustrating.

    All that it says is to take care not to overwhelm others and a bit on rate limits

    hrefna OP ,
    @hrefna@hachyderm.io avatar

    @julian But that could be specified at the protocol level. It isn't, but it is kind of weird

    There are entire sections on it for Dynamo (first image), Tiara discusses it extensively in the posted snippet (second image) and in multiple other sections, and it is covered as something to address in Requirements for Signaling Protocols (RFC 3726).

    These all have multiple sections addressing different parts of this problem and solve it with different levels of flexibility, but they all address it.

    Crash resistance. Observe that Tiara can be separated into disconnected components by the crash of even a single process. Tiara can be fortified against separation due to crashes in the following manner. At the bottom, each process maintains a crash-redundancy link to its right neighbor’s neighbor. That is, the bottom level list becomes doubly connected. Thus, it can tolerate a single crash. The crash tolerance can be further improved by adding similar links to more distant processes. Since these links only span a fixed number of processes, their construction does not affect the asymptotic complexity of stabilization of Tiara. Note that in an asynchronous model there is no reliable way to distinguish a crashed process from a slow one [15]. Thus, to accomplish this, the processes need to be equipped with failure detectors [9, 10]. A failure detector alerts the process if its neighbor crashes. Then, Tiara stabilizes to a legitimate state corresponding to the system without the crashed process
    5.10.3. Graceful Handling of NSIS Entity Problems NSIS entities SHOULD be able to detect a malfunctioning peer. It may notify the NSIS Initiator or another NSIS entity involved in the signaling process. The NSIS peer may handle the problem itself e.g., switching to a backup NSIS entity. In the latter case note that synchronization of state between the primary and the backup entity is needed.

    hrefna OP ,
    @hrefna@hachyderm.io avatar

    @jenniferplusplus

    That's a mood.

    @SoniEx2

    hrefna , to random
    @hrefna@hachyderm.io avatar

    It's fascinating to me looking at beginning language guides and thinking "what does this say about the culture of the language"

    When I was delving into it was (with affection) "here's hello world and here's a dense academic paper on implementing event systems in OCaml 5!"

    guides used to be centered on the assumption that you were a web programmer looking to do applets, even long after that assumption died.

    generally seems to assume a background in programming w/ a CLI.

    hrefna OP ,
    @hrefna@hachyderm.io avatar

    @jacket I'd describe ML as one of the major "lineages" and one of the branches that is most popular in the math space. A lot of papers in computer science use a pseudocode that derives from ML—especially in type theory—and most of the functional programming languages (or even languages with a functional element) have been influenced by it.

    So it comes up a lot, but mostly in terms of its influence. OCaml is one of the few remaining, actively developed, "true" ML dialects.

    lindsey , to random
    @lindsey@recurse.social avatar

    Now that it's been rejected from POPL, I can share what my students @Twisol and @redmp and I have been up to: a dependently-typed diagrammatic language for describing executions of concurrent systems! https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.10484

    Here's what I think is cool about it. 👇

    hrefna ,
    @hrefna@hachyderm.io avatar

    @lindsey

    Okay, as someone who is into distributed systems and more recently dependent types I nearly did a spit take: wait what do you mean happens-before as a dependent type!? Is this somewhere I can read about it or see more?

    hrefna ,
    @hrefna@hachyderm.io avatar

    @lindsey (I've already grabbed the paper and will be going through that later!)

  • All
  • Subscribed
  • Moderated
  • Favorites
  • •
  • random
  • test
  • worldmews
  • mews
  • All magazines
    •