R. A. Dehi @radehi@social.cleverlibre.org

@sachac @lxo This is really amazing. You implemented not only a waveform view but about half of a nonlinear video editor in #Emacs Lisp. I've used Emacs for years and had no idea this was even possible.

@ProPublica I know you're new to the Fediverse. Have you thought about putting things like this behind an "abortion" CW? Then people who don't want to get infuriated without warning could still follow your important reporting.

@barefootstache @pwinn the particular thing I'm puzzled about right now is whether #Markdown has to be implemented on the *reader's* instance or only the *sender's* instance. Since Gargron administers mastodon.social, he presumably wouldn't implement it if he thinks is bad, and probably once he does implement it, will be in the main repo. So I'm hoping that Mike answers my question about whether the post he boosted displayed with different typefaces for him.

Really though I need to learn basic things about ActivityPub first. Several steps away from a pull request!

@rmerriam @ambihelical I don't know, I'm going to wait until tomorrow before I ask him again.

@skdh@nerdculture.de It's a disproportionately influential audience because includes most journalists, so memes often propagate from Twitter to "reliable sources" and then Wikipedia.

Apparently a single AP reporter had enough power to singlehandedly convince most of the world that Russia had fired two missiles into a NATO country, nearly drawing NATO into an Article 5 war against Russia?

James LaPorta is like the Stanislav Petrov of Bizarro World: instead of singlehandedly preventing a nuclear holocaust, he almost singlehandedly caused one.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/ap-fires-reporter-behind-retracted-russian-missiles-story

@pwinn @ambihelical @freemo hmm, the fact that @mmasnick boosted and faved my post earlier today about #Markdown in https://qoto.org/@radehi/109384717356546713 led me to believe that he could see the formatting on mastodon.social (administered by Gargron himself), but technically he didn't actually *say* that.

The formatting is visible to you, Mike? Help us out here.

@mmasnick btw I really appreciate the CW

@pwinn @ambihelical @freemo Don't lose their #Markdown once they leave #Qoto! Is not like the (also broken) #Mathjax support. People on other instances can see them. I don't yet know how this works. The other instances have Markdown that's broken in exactly the same way? The JSON-LD contains the incorrectly rendered HTML and the other instances check it against a whitelist of allowed HTML tags?

There is a list of open Qoto bugs so people can find this information after today?

@rmerriam @shriramk Some concepts don't transfer across many languages (in Fortran, what's the equivalent of a Prolog logic variable, a Pure rewriting rule, or a Forth IMMEDIATE word?) and even concepts that transfer across many languages don't transfer across all (what's the equivalent of a `while` loop in Coq, a type declaration in Forth, a struct in Fortran 66, or a closure in C?)

I think the concepts that *don't* have an equivalent in languages you're familiar with are usually the most valuable, because sometimes give you powerful new ways to solve problems, and you can always implement them in your programming language of choice with enough effort, writing an interpreter if necessary.

@NorCal_Lynne @jeffjarvis @tomwatson Probably we're better off without having to deal with the kind of journalist who can't tell the difference between Mastodon and a company

@allenholub In a Bayesian sense there's no such thing as a completely unknown unknown because there's no uniform probability distribution over the whole real line or the whole positive real line. You probably don't know the volume of Lake Superior (to take an example from earlier today) but probably know is more than a liter and less than a googol liters. An unknown is always just a question of the probability distribution.

I agree that narrowing the scope of stories to the minimal possible scope is very valuable.

@allenholub I agree that is more extreme than most cases in practice, but is an extreme version of a universal problem in programming: we never *really* know what's hard and what isn't until we're done. Our Bayesian belief about completion time has a lognormal distribution with usually enormous variance, sometimes until the very moment of completion.

Often, though, a spike provides much information to reduce that variance, and is often valuable.

Thanks to some experiments with @ambihelical, we've characterized the particular way #Qoto's Markdown support is broken with respect to code blocks.

Its Markdown mode is exactly backwards with respect to newlines: are ignored inside code blocks, but inside normal paragraphs newlines are treated as `<br>`. But another bug in Markdown support partly cancels this out if the code block is at the beginning of the post, because then, treats the code block as a normal paragraph.

This suggests a straightforward, if inconvenient, workaround: instead of using a code block, use a normal paragraph, but wrap each line within the paragraph in `` ` ``. Unfortunately, due to a third bug in Markdown support, this doesn't actually work; the first line is fine, but the typewriter text on subsequent lines incorrectly fails to be recognized:

`def main():`
` print('hello')`
` print('world')`

A fourth bug means that newlines after the first one are ignored, perhaps because are incorrectly parsed as being part of another code block; I think in a case like this you don't have that problem:

def main():
print('hello')
print('world')

@jeffjarvis Can probably get by with less defensive measures than that, just because the background level of aggression here is so much lower than on Twitter. Except among recent arrivals from Twitter, but hopefully they'll acculturate soon enough when they realize their aggression isn't a winning strategy here.

@ambihelical @freemo See, there was a newline after the colon, but got eaten. Inspecting the page DOM shows that there's a `<pre>` and a somewhat unnecessary but harmless `<code>` inside it, but the actual text node in the DOM has no newline in it.

@ambihelical @freemo By "plain text mode" mean "not Markdown mode"? I don't have a problem with prepending four spaces to each line (that's standard Markdown, fenced code blocks are a common extension) but that didn't keep the buggy implementation from eating my newlines.

Let's try four spaces:

def main():
pass