sojournTime @sojournTime@social.cleverlibre.org

Back page of the Science Times in today’s New York Times.

PyTorch is not having a very happy end to the year

"... and the kiloseconds..."
"Do you mean milliseconds, Fred?"
"Oh yeah, maybe."
"A kilosecond would be a thousand seconds. I wonder how long that is?"
Pause. Mutter. "Three hundred...". Some nodding. "Sixteen minutes and 40 seconds."
My eyebrows shoot up. "Very good, bud! How did you work that out?"
"I know that five minutes is 300 seconds, and fifteen minutes is as close as I can get. Then I added one minute and 40 seconds."
Genuinely very impressed! #tmwyk

"Is 2023 a prime number, Bill?"
Very brief pause. "No, you can divide it by 7."
Honestly, he worked that out more quickly than I would have. "Can you?"
"Yes. If you add 7, you get 2030. Divide that by 10, you get 203. Add 7, you get 210. Divide it by 10, you get 21, which is 7 times 3."

#tmwyk

IPA

I bet you’ve heard of Galileo & Hubble, but what about Henrietta Swan Leavitt?

Leavitt changed astronomy. She figured out new ways to measure a star’s distance from Earth & her work helped determine the universe is expanding.

Her boss, Edward Pickering, published her findings UNDER HIS NAME. Later, Shapley used her findings to determine distances around the Milky Way w/o credit.

Leavitt’s work is still used today. So next time you hear about famous men in #science share her remarkable story.

@freemo I have no idea what this is, but I have to plug framework. Linux works great (barring very minor and easily fixable hardware accel issues).

They're repairable, thunderbolt 4 capable (works great with the Caldigit TS4 dock), and they're planning on working with coreboot and fully open-sourcing their schematics (for component level repair) soon! I love mine, and I just migrated from a thinkpad, but of course, YMMV.

@peterdrake @chris @s_gruppetta

My #PyConUS2022 talk was on #Python oddities and had this #pythonoddity as the punchline

http://trey.io/oddities

@peterdrake @chris As @s_gruppetta said, it's all about how += works on lists.

+= on mutable objects is a combination of __iadd__ and =,

The __iadd__ call succeeds but the assignment fails

Interestingly += on tuples doesn't work this way! The += operator falls back to __add__ followed by an assignment on immutable objects.

So while

a += b

Is the same as

a = a + b

With a tuple or a string.

Those two lines aren't the same on a list!

This oddity is in the docs too: https://docs.python.org/3.5/faq/programming.html#faq-augmented-assignment-tuple-error

Still one of the oldest #Python oddities I've ever seen 🐍🤔

>>> a = ([],)
>>> a[0] += ["what"]
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
TypeError: 'tuple' object does not support item assignment
>>> a
(['what'],)

Note that an exception was raised but the operation also worked! 😳 #pythonoddity

Playing with bevel gears, with @sabetta.

Yesterday would be the 35th birthday of Aaron Swartz.

He's been fighting for a free and open Internet and has tragically passed away after a legal battle in 2013.

He's been an important part of Creative Commons, Reddit (co-founder), Open Library, Demand Progress and many more.

A documentary:
https://vidcommons.org/w/jW7wSVvHF4o7LCTdaCCUQ2

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz

#AaronSwartz #CreativeCommons #OpenLibrary #Reddit #DemandProgress #Freedom #Internet

For legitimate pedagogical reasons, I just searched my Google Drive for "dank".

Microsoft Visual C++ ... Runtime Error!

What I wrote:
After consultation, we think this result is new

What I meant:
I asked the guy in the office next to mine and he said he'd never heard of it

What I wrote:
We conclude by formulating a conjecture about [...] and then prove one case under a mild technical assumption...

What I meant:
The mild technical assumption never holds in practice

The Puppy Gesserit litany:

[deep breath]

I must not chase. Squirrel is the mind-killer. Squirrel is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my squirrel. I will permit it to pass over me not through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the squirrel has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.

@rythur Our current monetary system may be dumb, but life would be overly complicated if we still had to use trade or a barter system to get things. Pooling resources and distributing has never worked well in practice, except at small scale (too much incentive to cheat, not much incentive to produce). Does that leave anything other than taking what you need by violence?

I've noted before that most of the neural network books on my shelf are blue. That's probably a coincidence, but the similarity between these two programming languages book covers (from different publishers) is just weird.