Federated Republic of Sean @freakazoid@retro.social

Boosting or posting Dilbert = instant unfollow.

I made a post that I can direct people at so they're not surprised when I say stuff they don't like, just because I happened to also say some stuff they did like.

https://undergroundeconomist.com/post/178417661943

This doesn't mean you shouldn't send me a follow request, though! My account is only locked to minimize the chance of follows by trolls or leakage of posts to undesirable servers.

Please fill out a profile and post some stuff before trying to follow me, or send me a DM introducing yourself.

How can we save the world if we can't even get people to stop spitting gum into urinals?

The way ChucK treats time is sort of mind-bending. However, I think the way they handle it syntactically is a mistake; manipulating time looks the same as connecting two generators together, but connecting two generators together doesn't cause any computation, while advancing time does. It also has other side effects like allowing other "shreds" to run.

Some kind of star transit detector seems most likely to be able to do this while being within reach for an amateur. I was initially thinking just an upward-pointing camera initially calibrated by taking pictures at known times and mapping calculated apparent locations of stars to pixels. But I think such a setup would probably be temperature-sensitive and prone to drift.

Anyone have any thoughts on how to do better?

The proposal to shut down WWV has me thinking about ways to keep track of time without external infrastructure. Sundials do this and have been around forever, but given the large angle the Sun subtends in the sky, it's very difficult to measure its position accurately enough to set a clock more precisely than a dozen seconds or so, and I'd like something closer to tenth of a second accuracy.

The rotation and orbit of the Earth. The precession of the equinoxes. Cesium, rubidium, hydrogen. Millisecond pulsars are such accurate clocks that NASA is building a space navigation system based on them, and astronomers use them to hunt for irregularities our realization of various timescales from TAI.

Can someone explain to me why Mastodon needs its own name for posting an ActivityPub action? Why should the rest of the Fediverse give a shit what software you're using? It's like saying "I'll iPhone you later."

Saw a bumper sticker that read "Elect progressive dem Kevin De Leo'n. Retire conservative RINO dem Diane Feinstein." Yes, they did use an apostrophe to represent an accent and misspell Dianne Feinstein's name.

I am concerned about the potential loss of Feinstein's seniority, but what has she done with it? She's strongly supported mass surveillance and failed to stop Kavanaugh's confirmation. I'm leaning toward De Leon right now.

It is much easier to make an unoccupied self-driving vehicle (i.e. a robot) safe; just make it much lighter, since it doesn't need to worry about its own survival in a collision.