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I have a cheap multimeter because I do not require one frequently enough to invest in a decent one. I noticed something interesting though: there are a lot of seemingly metallic things in my apartment that are surprisingly good insulators? (e.g.: a (brass?) doorknob)

I thought the multimeter was the problem, but when I measure something like a wire, it seems to be okay. Is this normal?

I'll have to check if I have any spare resistors with known values laying around to better test the meter.

in reply to Jonathan Lamothe

This is why gold is used in electronics so much. Copper may be a much better conductor than gold, but copper has surface oxidation that can get bad, while a thin plating of gold is... golden!

Aluminum oxidizes within seconds after scraping a fresh layer and why it's so difficult to work with





Just checked the mail and a day that I have been dreading is coming to pass. My family doctor is retiring.

There's a new doctor taking on his patients, but my current doctor's records are all on paper and the new one's are digital. I need to have my records digitized (at my own expense) to have them carried over.

It gets even better though. I've been assured that the company that will manage this digital transition is "physician-managed" and my records will be "stored securely". I fully trust my doctor's medical opinion, but as for opsec... well... one of the options is essentially: "please write all your sensitive PII on this request form and email it to us in plaintext." Yes, I can drop the form off in person, but that's rather beside the point.



Fine, I'll just add a pragma to ignore this one warning rather than fixing it.

It's fine.

It doesn't annoy me at all.

At all.



A piece of information that is repeated frequently enough will have a tendency to assert itself as true in the subconscious mind. This is a fact that is frequently exploited by propagandists.

Perhaps reminding people of this frequently enough will help to defend them against the tactic (with the unfortunate side-effect of being really annoying).



uspol

Oh right, the debate...

I think I'm gonna step away from my feed for a bit. I just don't have the mental bandwidth to deal with it atm.

Unknown parent

Jonathan Lamothe
@Tobias I could have, but it was easier to just temporarily disengage.




Did #Haskell at some point make defining a module without an explicit list of names to be exported illegal? It's yelling at me when I try to do this now.
in reply to Jonathan Lamothe

I noticed a while ago that they added a warning for that but it would still compile, but I wouldn't be completely surprised if it were an error now.
It's actually annoying in ghci because the warning gets repeated every time you define something.
in reply to Jeremy List

@Jeremy List No, it's still just a warning. I was using the --pedantic flag though (which turns warnings into errors).





math

Trying to wrap my brain around finite fields. I get how one can construct a finite field with an order of a prime number, but I don't get how it works with powers of primes. Everything I try to read on the subject eventually ends up getting into notation that I don't know how to read.

I think I get that a GF(p^n) has something to do with converting the field into a polynomial where all the coefficients are of GF(p), but that's where my understanding starts to fall apart.

Can anyone point me at something that will help me to better understand this?

in reply to Jonathan Lamothe

Happy birthday indeed! I'm sorry I only have a crappy salutation and no help for your math problem 😁


One of the easiest ways to manipulate someone with propaganda is to start with a person who believes themselves immune to propaganda.

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Okay, I'll admit it. Using #Haskell to talk to an #SQL database is not my favourite thing.

Programming Feed reshared this.

in reply to Boyd Stephen Smith Jr.

@Boyd Stephen Smith Jr. It's not so much the SQL part that's the irritating bit. It's that it doesn't really mesh super well with "the Haskell way of doing things".
in reply to Jonathan Lamothe

@BoydStephenSmithJr understandable. There's always a tension between "pleasant for the Haskeller" and "pleasant for the DBA" (or general SQL knower). We have the same problem at work (we sacrificed our DBA and used flora.pm/packages/@hackage/hpq… and its eDSL)



Had an optometrist's appointment today. Got confirmation of something I've known for some time: my depth perception sucks.

Sadly, it's not correctable, but it's been like that for as long as I can remember. I've learned to adapt.







Not sure, but I think the cat may have developed an intolerance to his super expensive prescription food.

That's neat.



Katy just got an ad for a "grounding sheet"... It's literally a blanket that plugs into a wall outlet so that you can be grounded while you sleep.

In case you're probe to static buildup in your sleep, I guess? How is this a thing?



nerdy math shower thought

So, I learned about Hamming codes a while back. They're pretty neat, but a lot of modern technology uses Reed-Solomon instead. I've wanted to learn about that one, but it involves some pretty heavy math that often goes over my head.

I've found a few different videos on YouTube that try to explain it "simply" but they all tend to gloss certain details over. After watching a few of them, I've noticed that the parts they gloss over are different from each other, and I'm wondering if I can just hunt down enough of them that I can piece the rest together myself.

All things considered, this seems a weirdly fitting way to learn it.

in reply to Jonathan Lamothe

nerdy math shower thought
For those interested, these three videos had enough information between them for me to piece it together:


πš›πšŠπš reshared this.

in reply to Jonathan Lamothe

nerdy math shower thought
Actually, I don't think that was the last piece...


Haven't checked in on the #minetest server in the past few days because I've been otherwise occupied. Had a look today and to my surprise, there was no immediately apparent spawn griefing.


Logged into my online banking to be greeted by a notification about an "unusual transaction". It was today's vet visit.

Yes. It was unusual. It was also entirely legit, but thanks.

in reply to Jonathan Lamothe

As a side note: I sent my parents a text asking if we could borrow $X to hold us over until next pay day. My mother replied by saying that she'd "accidentally" sent $(X + Y) and to spend the extra as we see fit. We have a tiny bit of breathing room again.

She is amazing, and I am so fortunate to have family who are able to help out in an emergency. It's not lost on me that many don't.



pet medical issues, stress

Benny (our cat) was under the weather yesterday so we took him to the vet. We went home with some meds and general optimism. He seemed to perk up later in the day.

This morning he's super lethargic and uninterested in his food. Which is super not like him. Have another appointment with the vet in an hour and a half.

Not only am I stressed out about the cat, but I'm also stressed about the added financial burden of two unexpected vet visits (and I feel like an asshole about the latter).

We'll figure it out, but if the universe could cut us some slack for like five minutes, that'd be great.

Edit: typo

in reply to Jonathan Lamothe

pet medical issues, stress
Preliminary test results look good-ish. Fingers crossed. 🀞
in reply to Jonathan Lamothe

pet medical issues, stress
Well, the appetite stimulant is working. He just got his usual level of hangry with me. Now he wants more. Still need to do some follow-up tests, but this removes a tremendous amount of stress.
in reply to Jonathan Lamothe

pet medical issues, stress

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SQL (sqlite3) question

I've run into a snag with an sqlite database I've been working on. Below is a simplified example of the problem.

Suppose I have the following table:

CREATE TABLE "prices" (
    "id"    INTEGER NOT NULL UNIQUE,
    "name"  TEXT NOT NULL UNIQUE,
    "list_price"    NUMERIC NOT NULL,
    "sale_price"    NUMERIC,
    "tax_rate"  NUMERIC NOT NULL,
    PRIMARY KEY("id" AUTOINCREMENT)
);

Is there a way to do something like the following?
SELECT
    name,
    CASE
        WHEN sale_price IS NULL
            THEN list_price
        ELSE sale_price
    END AS price,
    price * tax_rate AS tax
FROM prices;

The tax column doesn't seem to acknowledge the price column's existence, presumably because it's a column in the query rather than the source table. I could re-implement the CASE logic for the tax field, but that feels inelegant and error-prone.

Is there a better way to do this?

Shannon Prickett reshared this.

in reply to Jonathan Lamothe

You can use WITH to do it in two steps:
WITH pre_price AS (
    SELECT
        name,
        CASE WHEN sale_price IS NULL
            THEN list_price
            ELSE sale_price END
        AS price,
        tax_rate FROM prices
    )
    SELECT
        name,
        price,
        price * tax_rate AS tax
    FROM pre_price;
in reply to Jonathan Lamothe

SQL (sqlite3) question

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A text I just sent to my mother (presented with no context):

It's sometimes tricky that my wife and mother have very similar looking names and are alphabetically right next to eachother in my contacts. It's astonishing that that hasn't led to more embarrassing mistakes.
in reply to Jonathan Lamothe

You really need to add "probably" to one or the other.. as in "probably mother"
in reply to juliadream

@juliadream In practice, it ends up not being a big deal. I typically message my wife over a private Nextcloud instance that my mother is not on. A message for my mother accidentally going to my wife wouldn't be as big a deal.


Okay, I'm calling uncle.

I've exported the data from the LibreOffice Base database I've been working on to an SQLite file, and I'm just going to write a proper UI for it.

reshared this



Katy and I like to watch psychological thrillers from time to time, but I've noticed a recurring trope that confuses me. It goes like this: Psychopath lives in an outwardly normal looking house, but has a secret passage to a secret murder basement.

Who built this? Am I to believe he excavated the earth, poured the concrete, ran the (usually admittedly shoddy) electrical himself? Did no contractor at any point ever think to themselves: "this doesn't seem right. Perhaps I should alert the authorities?"

Edit: typo



Edit: I'm an idiot who confused diameter with circumference for some reason. Embarrassing original post follows.

Was playing around a bit with the OpenWeatherMap API. I wanted to know how precise I needed to be with the latitude & longitude values, so I decided to do some quick calculations.

To get a rough idea, I wanted to determine how much a change of one degree of latitude would move in kilometers. I knew the diameter of the earth was something fairly close to 40,000 km but wanted to verify that factoid. I did a quick duckduckgo search, and the top three results (on seemingly separate web sites) all said 12,756 km. In fact one of them hilariously said 12.756 km.

I assume this is the result of LLMs filling the internet with crap, but it's alarming that if I didn't know any better, I'd have just blindly accepted this as fact.

in reply to Jonathan Lamothe

12.756 km may be a locale difference; if the site wasn't US or UK-based the decimal might be the thousands separator.

the diameter of the earth was something fairly close to 40,000 km


s/diameter/circumference/?

in reply to Ryan Frame

@Ryan Frame Yeah, that was my mistake. I edited the post to reflect that, but Diaspora doesn't support edits.


Fine, I'll watch #wwdc24 to see what everyone's been talking about.

Before a few hours ago, I didn't even realize it was happening.



Today I booked an appointment with my optometrist to get my eyes checked. A few hours later I checked the (postal) mail to find a reminder card from them.

I was shocked at how quick the mail was, only to realize it was just a generic reminder that I was due for an eye exam. It was pure coincidence.



Israel/Palestine

Okay, I'm just going to say it because amazingly enough, some people don't seem to get this.

Just because I'm critical of Israel bombing hospitals in Palestine doesn't mean I'm pro-Hamas. I'm not.

It frustrates me that this is a thing that even needs to be said.

Edit: typo

Mx. Luna Corbden reshared this.

in reply to Jonathan Lamothe

Israel/Palestine

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Judy Anderson reshared this.

in reply to Jonathan Lamothe

Israel/Palestine

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in reply to Jonathan Lamothe

It wouldn't be difficult if Hamas soldiers were firing machine guns at Israeli children, but this isn't the case.

Unknown parent

Jonathan Lamothe
@uhuru I chose Debian because it's stable and boring. If I wanted bleeding edge as the default, I'd go with something like Arch instead.
Unknown parent

ilyess
@uhuru FWIW I personally had way more issues with Debian testing than with Arch 🀷


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