telharmonium's recent activity
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Comment on How Bluesky, the rival of Elon Musk’s X, is seizing the moment in ~tech
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Comment on Is a YouTube video with a static image technically a podcast? in ~talk
telharmonium LinkPodcasts, in the traditional sense, represent a particular confluence of technology and ideals: a completely de-centralized system for the distribution of media content, built on open standards....Podcasts, in the traditional sense, represent a particular confluence of technology and ideals: a completely de-centralized system for the distribution of media content, built on open standards.
This was revolutionary in 2003, and it's even more powerful today. Podcasts are not dependent on the goodwill of a parent company or the maintenance of a DRM server, and they have not yet been weaponized into tools of surveillance capitalism. The same cannot be said of YouTube, Spotify, TuneIn, SoundCloud, or whatever other would-be podcast platforms.
I could go on at length, but it would be better for all of us if I just link to the Daring Fireball piece "Not All Shows are Podcasts" instead.
All this is to say that yes, "podcast" is evolving into a broad term for a particular style of content, regardless of the underlying delivery technology. I only hope we do not also lose track of that egalitarian technology which distinguishes a podcast from a show hosted on a proprietary platform.
Traditional podcasts present a glimpse into an alternate reality in which the open web and interoperable standards of the mid-2000's prevailed, and independent media remained truly independent. They are an unlikely glimmer of light from a less-dark timeline. YouTube podcasts are not.
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Comment on Protesters, some armed, enter Michigan Capitol in rally against COVID-19 limits in ~news
telharmonium Link ParentI certainly don't speak for @aphoenix, but for myself I absolutely would (and do) think this is fucked up, whether I believed the government's actions to be tyrannical or not. Self-righteous armed...I certainly don't speak for @aphoenix, but for myself I absolutely would (and do) think this is fucked up, whether I believed the government's actions to be tyrannical or not. Self-righteous armed thugs, whether left-or-right wing, are not the saviors of life, liberty, and democracy.
If our political discourse is reduced to a question of who can carry the most assault rifles into public buildings, then we're all fucked. Our nation will be torn by spasms of violence and death, and the tyranny will only get worse. Expecting gangs of gun-toting reactionaries to solve a tyranny problem is like introducing mongooses to Hawaii to solve the rat problem. The reactionaries will leave the tyranny alone, and eat our ground-nesting democracy into extinction.
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Comment on What password manager, if any, would you recommend? in ~tech
telharmonium LinkI second @emdash's recommendation of EnPass as a user-friendly, non-subscription password manager. For work, however, I like Codebook by Zetetic. One reason is that it has the option to sync...I second @emdash's recommendation of EnPass as a user-friendly, non-subscription password manager.
For work, however, I like Codebook by Zetetic. One reason is that it has the option to sync directly between the desktop and mobile app over wifi, so syncing passwords doesn't require any 3rd party api or service, or even an internet connection.
It also has a cool feature they call "Secret Agent", which is a global keyboard shortcut to directly insert a given password anywhere as though it had been typed, instead of copying the password through the clipboard. You can also define actions with keypresses and wildcards, so you might define an action like
<tab><tab>#[email]<tab>#[password]<enter>as the Secret Agent action to login on a given website.This is perhaps less convenient than a traditional password manager extension would be for logging into most websites, but it's handy for quickly inserting your password into a terminal session (
#[password]<enter>), and especially convenient for auto-typing your username and password into a remote session with a dumb Windows VM which won't do clipboard sharing with your VNC client, for example (#[username]<tab>#[password]<enter>).The Codebook interface itself is a little clunky, at least on Mac, but the flexibility of Secret Agent for all the byzantine systems I have to login to during the day is fantastic. Perhaps others offer a similar feature, but I didn't see it when I surveyed the password manager landscape a few years ago.
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Comment on Programming Challenge: Dice Roller in ~comp
telharmonium LinkI know this isn't in keeping with the spirit of a challenge, but like @onyxleopard, I'd like to share one of these I wrote several years ago, in Python 2.7. It was part of an RPG project which...I know this isn't in keeping with the spirit of a challenge, but like @onyxleopard, I'd like to share one of these I wrote several years ago, in Python 2.7. It was part of an RPG project which never took off, but this feels like a good chance to dust it off and set it free, for whatever it's worth.
It satisfies the main criteria and the 3 bonuses, and can also handle exponentiation and implied multiplication with parentheses, like
2d4(3d2+9)^2. It will even work with eldritch dice expressions in which the number of dice, the number of sides the dice have, and the exponent are themselves determined by dice rolls:(2d4)d((3d20)^2d20).Finally, it can output the result as a number, or it can return a dictionary listing the results of each individual roll, and how the dice expression was tokenized:
> python roll.py -v "2d20 + 1d6 + 3d10" {'diceRolls': [{'rolls': [11, 1], 'sides': 20, 'sum': 12}, {'rolls': [5], 'sides': 6, 'sum': 5}, {'rolls': [2, 6, 6], 'sides': 10, 'sum': 14}], 'error': False, 'errorCode': False, 'origString': '2d20 + 1d6 + 3d10', 'result': 31, 'tokenized': [{'tokType': 'number', 'value': 2}, {'thisRoll': {'rolls': [11, 1], 'sides': 20, 'sum': 12}, 'tokType': 'operator', 'value': 'd'}, {'rollResult': {'rolls': [11, 1], 'sides': 20, 'sum': 12}, 'tokType': 'number', 'value': 20}, {'tokType': 'operator', 'value': '+'}, {'tokType': 'number', 'value': 1}, {'thisRoll': {'rolls': [5], 'sides': 6, 'sum': 5}, 'tokType': 'operator', 'value': 'd'}, {'rollResult': {'rolls': [5], 'sides': 6, 'sum': 5}, 'tokType': 'number', 'value': 6}, {'tokType': 'operator', 'value': '+'}, {'tokType': 'number', 'value': 3}, {'thisRoll': {'rolls': [2, 6, 6], 'sides': 10, 'sum': 14}, 'tokType': 'operator', 'value': 'd'}, {'rollResult': {'rolls': [2, 6, 6], 'sides': 10, 'sum': 14}, 'tokType': 'number', 'value': 10}]}The original idea was that this structure could be used by other libraries, or marshaled to JSON. The code theoretically uses a Top down operator precedence parser or Pratt parser, but I wasn't a CS major, so it probably shouldn't be used as an exemplar of the form. All the same, I hope this code might be useful to someone, or at least entertaining.
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Comment on What books are best experienced through a physical copy? in ~books
telharmonium LinkThe Selected Works of T. S. Spivet by Reif Larsen has extensive marginalia on almost every page; diagrams, maps, biographical digressions, all giving the story a unique depth and texture, but also...The Selected Works of T. S. Spivet by Reif Larsen has extensive marginalia on almost every page; diagrams, maps, biographical digressions, all giving the story a unique depth and texture, but also requiring a very particular layout to make sense.
I haven't read far enough yet to definitely recommend it, but I can say that the first third is very fun to read during a road trip through Montana.
Well, if RSS is your jam, Bluesky somewhat recently added per-user RSS feeds.