Gregory's Server
Just ~tripled the corpus size of @bottwosentencehorror so hopefully it'll see fewer repeated posts.
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I am interviewed in the Wall Street Journal today about the difficulty/futility of identifying bots on social media, and more generally why Elon Musk is likely blowing smoke saying that bots are the reason he is pausing his Twitter acquisition. https://www.wsj.com/articles/elon-musks-twitter-bot-problem-is-fake-news-11652868000 (paywalled, sorry!)
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@darius You can use the archive.today websute to find and/or create an archived, unpaywalled version of your article. It creates a URL for the archived version which you can share. Here's yours: https://archive.ph/q4EaO
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Is there a term I can search for that describes the following: - Study shows that A is correlated with B, r=0.9 The term I'm looking for is the "implied correlation" (my term) of A and C. 1) is it even epistemically valid, 2) how to calculate the implied r My instinct tells me 1) is "sort of" and 2) is simply r1 * r2 but my instinct is often wrong. Also does Bayes' theorem somehow apply here??
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@darius faintly reminds me of this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instrumental_variables_estimation but that's more about what you can put in a regression in place of something else, not just the correlation
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This is pretty much the answer to 2: https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/284877/correlation-between-three-variables-question Short of it is, given r1=0.9 and r2=0.8, the correlation r3 of A to C must be somewhere in the range of 0.458 and 0.981. So we can infer upper and lower bounds of correlation but not anything precise, and the lower bound is WAY worse than r1*r2 (and maybe this is coincidence but I suspect not, the mean of the range is r1*r2) Got into a discussion with someone on Twitter about what makes a programming language "good for beginners". They seemed to want to talk about syntax and stuff. My questions are: - how hard is it to install
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@darius I taught my niece Ruby using Hackety Hack years ago. It was an easy install, Ruby is (imo) fun and generally useful, and there's plenty of Ruby help/resources out there. It looks like Hackety Hack is no longer maintained, but that would have been my answer 10 years ago π I can't think of anything better than Excel today. Do kids still learn TI-BASIC on their graphing calculators?  @darius I think also the community around the programming language is super important. e.g. Updated the #hometown wiki listing to group servers into broad categories: https://github.com/hometown-fork/hometown/wiki/Hometown-servers I complain about this all the time but I just *love* how Google Meet absolutely tanks my CPU. Opening it in Chrome instead of Firefox does improve performance slightly (which, lol thanks Google) but ugh. I am sometimes in purely informational work meetings and it would be nice to multitask while they are on topics that aren't super relevant to me. Sucks. I'm at the point where I'm seriously considering dusting off an old laptop to just use for meetings so I can have my development machine free  @darius Current status: laptop fan audible above the audio in the Google Meet call I'm in π© The New Stack just published an interview with me called "Why Developers Should Experiment with the Fediverse": https://thenewstack.io/why-developers-should-experiment-with-the-fediverse/  As you can see, my Fediverse experiment is going well enough that I'm posting this comment from it.  WOWWWW someone released a free theme park simulator for PICO-8! Play it in the browser here: 
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@darius reminds me so much if dinopark tycoon I used to play in study hall⦠but myabe that had _slightly_ better graphics. I had to think about a time zone parsing problem for 5 minutes at work and my body was immediately overwhelmed by the need to sleep for an hour.
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 @darius I once had to work on a time zone problem. I remember explaining to the boss that time zones are just madness because they define more than a simple GMT offset; they also set your DST dates. And that matters in Arizona, where you're on Mountain time but don't observe DST, except for the Navajo nation, which does. He asked why that was so important, and I noted that tribal lands are over 1/4 the land mass of Arizona. Then he knew my pain. From the official Ruby DateTime docs: > If you also have to deal with timezones then best of luck - just bear in mind that you'll probably be dealing with local solar times, since it wasn't until the 19th century that the introduction of the railways necessitated the need for Standard Time and eventually timezones. Friends don't let friends use time zones My favorite Mastodon 3.5.0+ feature is that if you have full text search on your server, you can search for "from:username@anyserver.whatever foobar" And it will filter search results for just posts made by username@anyserver.whatever. This is a further refinement to the existing search, so the limitation of "posts that either were made by you or you have favorited, bookmarked, or are replies to you" still applies. It's SO MUCH EASIER to search through my old posts now.
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 @darius Dang, I wish I were on a server with full text search enabled! This sounds so useful! @darius I recall from runyourown.social that you had a separate server full-text search. Any rough guidelines on resource requirements? I'm on a tiny VPS and didn't enable FTS because I didn't see anything in the Mastodon documentation about system reqs. Meedan, the non-profit where I work, is looking for a social media intern to help with comms. This is a paid position. Meedan is fully remote and has been for more than a decade. https://meedan.bamboohr.com/jobs/view.php?id=35&source=bamboohr This would be a great job for someone passionate about our mission, which you can read about here: https://meedan.com/about A patch release of Hometown (v1.0.6+3.5.2) is coming later today. It will include: - A CSS patch to our Macaron (Pastel Light) theme that fixes a bug that made the reporting interface unusuable Okay, new Hometown release is out. It's v1.0.6+3.5.2 and contains mostly bugfixes and three new features. I will explain the features (and maybe some bug fixes) in this thread. Full release notes and upgrade instructions here: https://github.com/hometown-fork/hometown/releases/tag/v1.0.6%2B3.5.2 @darius @mkljczk re #1165, would it be possible to avoid showing the icon for alt texts that aren't helpful? e.g. one word descriptions, too short ones, file names, and ones that are simply a copy of the toot text. or maybe it could show a different icon that prompts the user to check to see if it is a useless description @danbruno Picked it back up. I'm spoiled enough to say: what a little shit this guy is  @darius @danbruno Say, we've been playing those too (well, @haloedrain plays and I watch). Which one is that? I don't recognize that guy  Sooo as an experiment I have decided to start hosting my new fediverse bots on my own software rather than a Mastodon server like botsin dot space. If you follow @bottwosentencehorror you should at some point see posts in your timeline that are parodies of the "bad two sentence horror" Twitter account. They should look something like the attached image (though not with formatting if you're on vanilla Mastodon).
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@darius Good luck with hosting your own Masto instance for your bots. Also, is the story in the link for reals or is that also a mock-up?
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/r/badbadtwosentencehorror "Portland church members have been stitching needlepoint pew cushions for 32 years. Theyβre finally done" |
@darius mind flagging that account as a bot? Thanks!
@bottwosentencehorror