Sven Slootweg (soft-deprecated) @joepie91@pixie.town

Forget colony sims, I want commune sims

Just gonna leave this here.

Who is working on accessibility of maths _research_?
I know lots of people looking at improving maths education, but is there anything interesting happening in research?
The only ideas I have at the moment are to talk to @pkra; Volker Sorge's work on spoken maths in MathJax; and the arXiv team's work on converting preprints to HTML.

Are there any physical disability issues that affect research mathematicians?

DB strikes would be more effective if it was in any way different from normal DB service

So have I got this right?

We've known for about a decade (and had reasonable suspicions for about 2 decades) that the Post Office #Horizon system was well dodgy and people were being wrongly convicted, but the government are finally acting now because someone made a telly programme about it?

Could someone maybe make a telly programme about #ClimateChange?

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-67908791

i saw this url and i love it lmao https://homophobicshitcoinbrowser.com

Over de verhuisplicht voor bijstandsgerechtigden | nieuws elders
https://www.doorbraak.eu/over-de-verhuisplicht-voor-bijstandsgerechtigden/

#FuckDeParticipatiewet

@jonny when I first had to use Linux as an entire laptop OS and not just on a server, figuring out *how to unpack an archive* was nontrivial -- didn't have the command line tools I wanted yet and I thought that when I was seeing the contents in the extract utility gui, it was unpacked, when really it was a view into the intact archive.

When I had to use windows for something I was really stuck when `ls` wasn't a valid command. No idea how to move forward. And I didn't know how to interact with the OS in gui form.

First time getting a bucket full of source code that wasn't python, I didn't know the convention for how to compile it. Very few READMEs actually say, you need to say "make" in this directory, or you need to put this thing here in your path. And you've got to already know all the file extensions and which ones might contain instructions and scripts.

First time trying to set up a raspberry pi, I was reading "flash this" and "run that" but not "plug this in there and make it start up" or "you're gonna be typing on your laptop to control this other piece of electronics that doesn't have a keyboard."

There's a truly massive knowledge gap before most beginner guides are helpful and where you don't know what terms to search for.

i was playing an in-browser game with someone last night and got to talking and i mentioned i was a programmer. they said they had always wanted to learn, and so i suggested the time tested strategy of just getting mad whenever a computer didn't do something they wanted it to. they mentioned hating some features of the game, and since the game's code is clear (semi-retro Angular) and comes with a sourcemap i recommended they try taking a stab at reading it. i gave them some tips on starting points and how to read it. we were playing a game so i wasn't necessarily trying to teach, just give them a starting point for later if they wanted.

they told me that they would try but the learning curve was always a cliff, and i knew they were right but holy SHIT they were so immediately right. they asked me how to save the source to read later, and there isn't actually a way to save unpacked sourcemap code from firefox. I said your best bet was to just copy and paste each file, or since they already had homebrew and npm, they could try copy/pasting something like wget URL; npx unpack file; open . and linked them to this package which to me is super clear, but they were just dumbfounded by it.

They were (correctly) like "you say follow the instructions there but the word "instructions" is nowhere on this page, literally the entire thing is code. there isn't even a download button or anything, how do i get the program, what the fuck is this site?" Every part of what i was telling them was totally new to them, I thought that "just open this program and copy and paste this text" would be doable even if they didn't get what was going on, just so they would have something to look at later, but that act of exposure was so discouraging I felt bad and we just quit the game and i talked them through some of it. We got stumped at merely trying to download the code. Not even reading it yet, definitely not trying to run it.

I've taught ppl to program to a level of basic self-directedness maybe a dozen times, and every time I remember just how inaccessible this whole racket is. I remember all that extremely well myself, and I still am not close to being able to imagine what a really legible programming ecosystem would look like

@njion I swear, the education system is an authoritarian nightmare and the main reason people tolerate it is just ideological inertia combined with denying the autonomy of students as not exactly "full people".

apparently some people go to bed and just...sleep??? they don't plot a 7 book epic fantasy series or softly broil in existential dread or replay every mistake they've ever did??? and the wake up [checks notes] REFRESHED?!?! i just- it sounds a bit fake

NEW ONES. plus the n-gage one from back then

oh god apparently I hung onto these from 3 years ago

nothing I drew today turned out good, so this house is going for a stroll.

#MastoArt
#StrollUary (?)

Dixie of the moat, tell me your secrets