Thomas Dickerson @elfprince13@mumak.app
- Personal
- http://sfgp.cemetech.net/
co-Founder // Chief Science Officer at @geopipe (🖖🏻), PhD from Brown CS Dept (w/ @maurice), SMCVT alum (Math/Physics/CS), admin at Cemetech, AFOL & open-theist.
Decentralizing systems (human & digital). Opinions are my own.
📍 Vermont
Joined Nov 2022
@shriramk @ricci @geomblog
FWIW, The Hobbit is much shorter, and tells a self-contained story that works independently of the LOTR. Also a great family read-aloud story to share with the kid if that's something you do. There's a 60 year time jump and a big tonal shift to LOTR (and that's the real rabbit hole as it was written as one ~1000 page novel that the publisher insisted on splitting up to avoid scaring off readers)
@Popehat Outside of a few very specific sub-topics (i.e. self-harm), I, for one, don't want to see mental health conversations behind a filter...
@shriramk @ricci @geomblog Also I suspect you would deeply enjoy the absolutely next-level language/word games in Tolkien's writing, although if you're on the fence about it, starting with one of his short stories (e.g. Farmer Giles of Ham) is probably easier than diving into the Middle Earth legendarium.
Thomas Dickerson
boosted
I feel bad for Mastodon. It's the cozy tea shop down the street from a raucus punk club that was just taken over by Nazis, and now all the punks are hanging out because there wasn't anywhere else to go and no one is quite sure what to do because they're good punks but they're not that into tea.
Thomas Dickerson
boosted
@juddlegum I know this dude's whole life is turning out to be a fiction but....this honestly seems like one of the more plausible aspects?
@th_in_gs iirc, dude taught himself programming by printing out the z80 opcode table at the library and memorizing the hex values.
@th_in_gs I got to be a sounding board for the author when he was designing the virtualization techniques for some of the original TI-Boy SE's features, and I wish I could remember where that chat archive went.
Thomas Dickerson
boosted
The bit about a lawyer being stopped from entering a music hall in the US because its facial recognition system picked up that she's part of a law company that's suing them is even crazier than I thought.
The law company isn't suing the music hall - it's suing a restaurant, in another state, which is owned by the hall's parent company MSG Entertainment. MSG gone ahead and harvested photos of all the lawyers in the firm and fed it to an image recognition system to ban them from every MSG Entertainment owned location.
People always tell me that if you've got nothing to hide then you've got nothing to fear. She's got nothing to hide and they still went after her.
If this doesn't start making people worried about facial recognition then there's serious trouble coming.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2022/12/facial-recognition-flags-girl-scout-mom-as-security-risk-at-rockettes-show/
The law company isn't suing the music hall - it's suing a restaurant, in another state, which is owned by the hall's parent company MSG Entertainment. MSG gone ahead and harvested photos of all the lawyers in the firm and fed it to an image recognition system to ban them from every MSG Entertainment owned location.
People always tell me that if you've got nothing to hide then you've got nothing to fear. She's got nothing to hide and they still went after her.
If this doesn't start making people worried about facial recognition then there's serious trouble coming.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2022/12/facial-recognition-flags-girl-scout-mom-as-security-risk-at-rockettes-show/
@th_in_gs @DiConX if you haven’t seen https://github.com/calc84maniac/tiboyse and https://github.com/calc84maniac/tiboyce yet, you’re in for a treat
@chrisfried I think about this sometimes (why is the first day of summer “Midsummer”?!), but the day length is really only like the second derivative of the seasonal temperature variations, so honestly it works better as is (we’ve only been having “winter” weather for a couple weeks now)
@yana honestly the reason I never got into WoW was that by the time I had free time and money to try it, they’d already introduced Garrosh and the dream of Durotar was dead
Thomas Dickerson
boosted
1/ I've been active on Mastodon for over a month now, and a few thoughts about what it's been like. Following M protocol I'll make the rest of this thread Unlisted, so if you are not a follower, you'll need to click on this to see the rest. (Followers, sorry, you get the whole thread in reverse order…)
First off, this is my 6th SN: Usenet, G+, Fb, Quora, Twitter, and M. So I've been through all the stages, and gotten used to picking up and moving home. (I have not quit Twitter entirely.) ↵
Thomas Dickerson
boosted
13/ Where I do hope my fellow academics will be responsible is holding the line: no cheapo papers about pseudo-Mastodons or fake-ActivityPubs. Mastodon and ActivityPub aren't a commons to be exploited and depleted. You have to actually have improved the thing you claim. Certainly, if I'm your reviewer or audience member, that's what I'm going to ask you about. ↵
@The_Tim ridiculously adorable
- Personal
- http://sfgp.cemetech.net/
co-Founder // Chief Science Officer at @geopipe (🖖🏻), PhD from Brown CS Dept (w/ @maurice), SMCVT alum (Math/Physics/CS), admin at Cemetech, AFOL & open-theist.
Decentralizing systems (human & digital). Opinions are my own.
📍 Vermont
Joined Nov 2022
