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foone
@Foone 5 years, 6 months ago 1147 views

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I didn't have a picture handy to post today for my sleep-picture, so here's an old picture of when we brought in our recliner and Babby SCSI thought it was a fun new toy to climb on

she also liked to get in the way of keyboard repair process

her favorite youtuber was @TheCaptainSauce

and sometimes she'd just hang out near the keyboard and be like "why are you reading wikipedia and not PETTING ME?"

sometimes she was unaware that an evil wizard was sneaking up on her

and occasionally she'd tried to steal my DC power adapters

but THE TRAP WAS SPRUNG and then she was captured.
THE THIEF WILL NOT ESCAPE

we got a carrier thing so we could take her to the veterinarian and we were afraid she wouldn't want to get in it.
so naturally she got into the box

she liked to a bite a lot, and scratch and such, so I went and got some metal-reinforced gloves to protect myself.
It didn't work. She bit right through them

and sometimes she decided I didn't need a mouse, at least not more than she needed a pillow

sometimes you wouldn't even know if she was there. you'd just be walking past a monitor and it'd attack you

she tried to learn some microcontroller programming but she wasn't very good at it

She was better at server stuff

"why do you want to use my bed, hairless ape?"

one of her favorite skills is to lay down in the middle of the floor, so that you have to step over her to get to where you need to go, and then she can attack your feet

containers are good at trapping her. you don't even need to turn them upside down, and you don't even need a lid.
just put one out, and she'll jump in.

she then spent most of the next two years learning kung-fu

BTW, I was saying "was" with SCSI because I started talking about Baby-SCSI. She's not dead or anything.

She's sleeping outside my door right now.

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foone
@Foone

argh chrome updated and it seems they've intentionally broken custom search engines. I have had a keyword search for "foone" which searches my own twitter, so I just type "foone BLAH" and it gives me a twitter search for when I said BLAH, right?

but now I get that option in the titlebar of "search twitter self-search" which is the name of the search"
if I just type "foone blah" now...

it ignores the search I have had defined for years and just googles it.

and this is definitely on purpose because they didn't just break it, they changed it. it's now "fooneblah"

there doesn't seem to be an option to make this stop and get the old behavior back :(

foone
@Foone

I like how mediawiki exports pages because there's nothing I enjoy more than parsing a 1 gigabyte XML file

and I'm doing simple-english-wiki! it's way smaller than english wikipedia
I can only imagine how impossibly unparsable that nightmare is

fun fact: when programmers need to write code to extract data from an XML file, the process usually goes like this:
1. find XML file
2. open it in a text editor, see what the structure is
3. write some code that parses that

do you really want to open a 1 gigabyte XML file in your text editor?

do you want to fucking die?

I used to run into this problem back when I worked for the government, because sometimes I'd click a database query log (don't ask why our logs were in XML, it's... complicated) and it would turn out to be 100mb

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foone
@Foone

It is 2018 and this error message is a mistake from 1974.
This limitation, which is still found in the very latest Windows 10, dates back to BEFORE STAR WARS. This bug is as old as Watergate.

When this was developed, nothing had UPC codes yet because they'd just been invented.
Back when this mistake was made, There was only one Phone Company, because they hadn't been broken up yet. Ted Bundy was still on the loose. Babe Ruth's home run record was about to fall.

When this bug was developed, Wheel of Fortune hadn't yet aired. No one had seen Rocky Horror. Steven Spielberg was still a little-known directory of TV films and one box-office disappointment. SNL hadn't aired yet. The Edmund Fitzgerald was still hauling iron ore.

WHEN THIS STUPID MISFEATURE WAS INVENTED, THE GODFATHER PART II HAD JUST OPENED IN THEATERS.

So, why does this happen? So Unix (which was only 5 years old at this point) had the good idea of "everything is a file" which mean you could do things like write to sockets, pipes, the console, etc with the same commands and instructions.

foone
@Foone

I was todays years old when I learned that Final Fantasy VII's Midgar Zolom is an exceptionally badly translated reference to Jörmungandr, the world serpent from Norse mythology.

The other name for Jörmungandr is Miðgarðsormr, which got rendered into katakana as ミドガルズオルム, or "Midogaruzuorumu".
But when it was translated back into English, the translator didn't get the reference.

So they split that into the city name Midgar and the rest as... "Zolom".
Which is not a word.

It was supposed to be a bit of a pun in Japanese. Midgar, the big city in FF7, is named after Midgard, the Old Norse name for the Earth (as opposed to the other realms of the Nine Worlds)

so obviously a big snake living near the city of Midgar would be the Miðgarðsormr, since that basically translate as "Midgard Serpent"

foone
@Foone

yesterday: somewhat viral post about shooting billionaires into the sun (and my stupid "WELL ACTUALLY" reply)
also yesterday: elon musk leaves twitter "for a while" and jeff bezos steps down

COINCIDENCE? I THINK NOT!

elon's gotta be off twitter for a while because they don't have wifi on the SunCrasher 9000, and bezos keeps stealing his phone anyway

elon thought he wouldn't need it because of starlink but THE SATELLITES ARE IN LOW EARTH ORBIT, MUSK, AND YOU'RE HEADED TOWARDS THE SUN

bill gates is the only one who still has internet access because he remembered to set up a long enough ethernet cable

(although tim cook joked that was just because his WinPhone doesn't have wifi support anyway)

zuckerberg asked if bill gates would let him use the network connection for a while and while billy g was fine with it, it turns out none of the other billionaires brought phones with built in ethernet ports

finally, the win95 phone comes up top!

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$Andrew Barry \U0001f981$

Andrew Barry 🦁...
@Bazzaruto

In the spirit of @threadapalooza, here are all my tweets on building courses, all in one place with 1 line summaries

Continually updating...

Everything I know about how to create a transformational online course

Let's go 👇

1/ The thread that started it all, a collection of my essays and checklists on the

Do you have an online course?

I want to tell you a little about learning architecture.

My agency partners with content experts to help them create courses, and I've written extensively about it.

If you want to learn about educational design, here's a start \U0001f447
— Andrew Barry \U0001f981 (@Bazzaruto) October 18, 2020

2/ There are two stages to building a successful online course business - launch and your first students

They require mastering different skill

As my friend @BillyBroas pointed out to me last week: online courses are moving upmarket.

What does this mean if you want to create an online course these days?

Think of it in two stages
— Andrew Barry \U0001f981 (@Bazzaruto) October 28, 2020

3/ Avoid the same mistakes I made over the last 15 years doing this

Some of the mistakes I've made creating online courses make me cringe

This coming week I'm going to share a few lessons I've learned from mistakes like these
— Andrew Barry \U0001f981 (@Bazzaruto) November 23, 2020

4/ Great online courses are not about the transfer of knowledge

They're about the transformation of students

\u2018Education is the kindling of a flame, not the filling of a vessel.\u2019

\u2013Socrates
— Andrew Barry \U0001f981 (@Bazzaruto) November 23, 2020

cove
@sanaorlove

send your unpopular kpop opinions and i'll give my pov on that <3

Fan service can be so irritating at times —

Lia isn't a bad dancer —

3rd generation music is superior —

Twice is overrated —

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$nat loves julie\U0001f3d3 l WandaVision era \u1c6c l semi ia$

nat loves julie🏓 l Wan...
@Billieuwuz

Brie Larson as m&m colors, a thread:

https://t.co/PaF0HWN5Id

https://t.co/sLOyFZttXt

https://t.co/rOL40clCj6

https://t.co/iOlwhO6lLz

$It's real, Gareth \U0001f34a \U0001f34a \U0001f34a$

It's real, Gareth 🍊 🍊 ...
@StefGotBooted

Welcome to the end of year Brendan thread. I am going to post every Brendan I have in my phone (253). They're literally just going to appear in the order I saved them. Unfortunately I've no idea who the vast majority of them were made by so I can't attribute credit. Let's begin.

The one and only original. I do know who made this because I asked her (@katastrophising) to do it for an article. Lol.

Another classic.

Brainworms, this was for another article.

$Danno \u2b50\ufe0f\u2b50\ufe0f\u2b50\ufe0f \U0001f1fa\U0001f1f8\U0001f1fa\U0001f1f8\U0001f1fa\U0001f1f8$

Danno ⭐️⭐️⭐️ 🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸...
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Patriots and mental attitudes.

This is going to be a rough one. I’m calling a lot of you out in this one. You’ll know who you are. If you protest too loudly and get offended, yes, you are the topic here.

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Laurie Voss
@seldo

The 2018 State of JavaScript survey is out. They got 20,000 responses and have some delicious, delicious data. I'mma thread in some highlights:

First up: JavaScript flavors. There's TypeScript at 47% adoption, a tad higher than npm's own survey results (which said 46%). npm's survey is coming up again soon and will ask about TypeScript in a lot more detail.

I really, *really* like SoJ's "would not use again" question, which lets people who've abandoned a tech self-identify. This is noticeable in the graph above with Flow users -- 41% of people who've used Flow say they wouldn't use it again.

Now JavaScript frameworks. It's been a full year since npm's survey, so these numbers differ from ours in the directions I expected:
React 65% (vs. 60%)
Vue 29% (vs. 24%)
Ember 5% (vs 4%, I was expecting a bigger rise)

But there's a shocker in here: Angular.

npm's survey had Angular at 40% last year and SoJ has it at either:
- 58% (if you include those who don't want to use it again)
- 24% (if you count only those who like it)
Since npm's question didn't ask if they intend to *continue* using it I think that might explain this.

Guillaume Chaslot
@gchaslot

The YouTube algorithm that I helped build in 2011 still recommends the flat earth theory by the *hundreds of millions*. This investigation by @RawStory shows some of the real-life consequences of this badly designed AI.

Flat Earth conference attendees explain how they have been brainwashed by YouTube and Infowars https://t.co/gqZwGXPOoc
— Raw Story (@RawStory) November 18, 2018

This spring at SxSW, @SusanWojcicki promised "Wikipedia snippets" on debated videos. But they didn't put them on flat earth videos, and instead @YouTube is promoting merchandising such as "NASA lies - Never Trust a Snake". 2/

A few example of flat earth videos that were promoted by YouTube #today:
https://t.co/TumQiX2tlj 3/

https://t.co/uAORIJ5BYX 4/

https://t.co/yOGZ0pLfHG 5/

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Sevak Sathaya
@Sevakofmata

Sharing one incident... After Modi's Trichy youth conference, the very next morning when police were clearing up their mini-control room, they found 5 strange boys who were roaming there with bags. When police enquired them "Sir, we are from Subramaniapuram in Trichy.

Whatever political meeting or conference is held in this ground, we come here on the same night or morning hours to collect the Liquor bottles to sell in the scrap shop for 50 paisa to 1 rupee per bottle and we used to earn Rs 200 to Rs 400 on each such event.

Even in the last DMK meeting the very next day we collected around 1500 bottles. But for Modi's BJP meeting, we could not find even a single bottle in the whole ground. We are coming around and around and not a single bottle in any corner of the G Corner ground in Trichy,

we are much disappointed, sir!". Police seem were stunned and pleasantly surprised. This is what Modi magic does in this nation. Modi is the one who can lead our nation and make everyone prosper with hardwork in right direction and proper approach.

This funny but interesting anecdote was published by a statewide local daily Dinamalar. I have just translated and posting it here for rest of the nation;

$Anu Satheesh \U0001f1ee\U0001f1f3$

Anu Satheesh 🇮🇳...
@AnuSatheesh5

Mangottu Bhagavathi Temple
#Palakkad #Kerala
#keralatemples 🚩

Mangottu Bhagavathi Temple is situated in Athipotta near Alathur of palakkad district. Devi is kshipraprasadi here and grants relief to those who worship with full faith.
Mookken Chathen, situated on the Northern 👇

side of the temple, is guarding Devi here.
Story says that, once there lived a weaver named Kuttan who was a Devi Bhaktan. During one festival time Kuttan was so pleased by the Devi Vigraham that he requested her to come along with him. At that time wind blew heavily and Cloths

in Vigraham flew. Kuttan immediately decorated Devi with his cloth which stuck to Vigraham and returned to his village and with his Umbrella. Devi came with him in that Umbrella and stayed in his place. This place is Mangottu Bhagavathi temple now.

Amme Narayana
🙏🕉🙏

Roger Grosse
@RogerGrosse

Important paper from Google on large batch optimization. They do impressively careful experiments measuring # iterations needed to achieve target validation error at various batch sizes. The main "surprise" is the lack of surprises. [thread]

https://t.co/7QIx5CFdfJ

The paper is a good example of lots of elements of good experimental design. They validate their metric by showing lots of variants give consistent results. They tune hyperparamters separately for each condition, check that optimum isn't at the endpoints, and measure sensitivity.

They have separate experiments where the hold fixed # iterations and # epochs, which (as they explain) measure very different things. They avoid confounds, such as batch norm's artificial dependence between batch size and regularization strength.

When the experiments are done carefully enough, the results are remarkably consistent between different datasets and architectures. Qualitatively, MNIST behaves just like ImageNet.

Importantly, they don't find any evidence for a "sharp/flat optima" effect whereby better optimization leads to worse final results. They have a good discussion of experimental artifacts/confounds in past papers where such effects were reported.