David Smith is a user on octodon.social. You can follow them or interact with them if you have an account anywhere in the fediverse. If you don't, you can sign up here.

David Smith @emallson@octodon.social

I have a presentation in...5 hours... and I forgot my copy of the paper (with all my notes on it) at home. fml

i have exactly one pen with me and the tip of it is stuck inside the lid. attempting to remove the lib merely removes the lower portion of the pen.

wat do

> import numpy as na

NO THAT IS NOT HOW THIS WORKS

aaand now Modular implies both Submodular and Supermodular.

In a fit of procrastination today, I moved the curvature bounds on my greedy optimization crate `avarice` from being a runtime-checked enum to a compiletime-checked trait bound (with custom derive).

It was surprisingly easy. A couple questions remain (e.g. should a Modular objective also be marked with both Submodular and Supermodular traits? probably yes... but I don't use those yet) but seems good so far.

github.com/emallson/avarice.rs

Me, two months ago: *complex method to estimate single number*

Me, now: what if we just measure it directly? :thinking:

David Smith boosted

Apologies to everyone I had to leave out! (your instances are great too)

From Witches to Dolphins, These Are the Communities That Make Mastodon Great motherboard.vice.com/en_us/art #eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee

David Smith boosted

Hello, Octodonners. It looks like Alice's patreon in support of our chosen instance has plateaued. Please do what you can to help our friendly neighborhood cyberpunk queen, @CobaltVelvet

Donating is grand; boosting this, even, will be helpful, to get the message around.

patreon.com/CobaltVelvet

David Smith boosted

FDA goes after 'homeopathic' product that killed babies.

arstechnica.com/science/2017/0

I was given frozen carrots to chew on when teething, which seemed to work out well enough.

Homeopathy is utter garbage; it has no place outside of Charles Dickens novels.

My walk from the bus stop to the lab was...interesting...this morning.

First: a squirrel was hanging upside down nibbling on an apple, not even caring about the tour going by. :thumbsup:

Alas, twas not all so nice: once I reached the plaza I saw every light poll having a pair of McCarthyist flyers taped on.

"We must ensure a Marxism-free campus."
"If you see communist activity, report it to your local police." :thumbsdown:

Really hope this was just an art project.

Before & after reducing divisions from k to 1. White cells are caused by an excessive number of divide-by-zeros (some # of them are unavoidable afaik).

Numerical stability matters, folks.

octodon.social/media/BPKnibUKQ octodon.social/media/2HfG5h6iB

David Smith boosted

Mastodon instance idea! Show more

David Smith boosted

Tech writers: mastodon is not a proper social medium
Masto users: but we're social all the time?
Tech writers: nono. what we mean is that our advertisers can't pump money into profit like they're used to
Masto users: [swears in French]

Think my advisor would mind if I binged on WoW while I wait?

octodon.social/media/y91gCMa2W

The most useful programming technique I learned in college is to use algebra to eliminate as much division and subtraction as possible.

Division is the devil and subtraction is his child.

David Smith boosted

Now that github.com/tootsuite/mastodon/ is closed - thank you! - I will mention that this is a very common issue.

It's very tempting for webdevs to put a helpful "you put in the wrong username/email" notice on the signin or password reset page. It feels helpful, y'know?

However, it ends up helping attackers more often than it helps any legitimate folks.

It's better to have a -single- message regardless of the success or failure.

David Smith boosted

Hey admins of smaller servers, i have to tell you something!
In the first days of social.tchncs.de i explored some gnusocial and mastodon servers for interesting and active users and followed them from here. So the these where about 20people from random but maybe 8 different instances and about 100 from boosts. Everything else happened by itself. I stopped with this weeks before the twitter update and never needed a bot. My server knows 601 servers atm and my federated timeline is hyperactive.

Problem: divide-by-zeros are screwing up my results.

Solution: don't divide.

I wish it were always this easy.

I have a *FUN* problem where a binary search on a continuous domain doesn't terminate when I run it via Luigi but does terminate whenever I run it manually to try to isolate the bug.

I thought I fixed this problem, too...

David Smith boosted

"Unfortunately, Haskell has no currying, so we’re forced to build our own tools for partial functions" aphyr.com/posts/342-typing-the